The slow grinding
process of the Scottish Government in formalising strict protection of the
free living beaver is an expanding window of opportunity for their
slaughter. A recent survey of the numbers of beaver in the River Tay
catchment shows their continuing successful breeding and distribution.
However, it also threw up evidence of abandonment by beavers of sites that
were occupied in 2012, but were now devoid of fresh field signs. The only
conclusion can be that beaver had been slaughtered out at those sites.
Will strict protection make any difference when these land users have got
used to being able to get away with slaughter with impunity?

Landscapes have to
be unshackled from agriculture if there is to be hope that they will
really rewild. Few people get this, nor do they get that public ownership
is probably the best bet to remove agriculture. Thus it was an unexpected
surprise that someone does actually get it. In an otherwise uninspiring
Peoples Manifesto for Wildlife, Mark Avery gets right to the heart of it
with his proposals to build a land bank of publicly owned land in the
uplands through using the money saved by withdrawal of farm subsidy,
renationalising the water industry, and requiring the Public Forest Estate
undergo transformation to native woodland. Eventually, after ecological
restoration, this land bank will be of sufficient size to seriously
consider reinstatement of former native species like beaver and lynx.

There is a growing
literature that demonstrates the damage that can be done when
anthropogenic noise rises above natural sounds, effectively masking those
sounds. This is disruptive of wildlife communication and behaviour, and
may interfere with finding desirable habitat and mates, avoiding
predators, protecting young, and establishing territories. There is
evidence that the health of a habitat may be reflected in the state of its
soundscape. What if we turned this around so that acoustic measurements
were able to differentiate contours of wildness?

Exploring the back
history of rewilding shows a clear connection to the new science of
conservation biology, and the commitment amongst a small group of pioneers
to apply that science in designing ecological restoration based on
networks of large, core areas buffered with sympathetic human use areas
and linked together through wildlife corridors.

The months of April
and May witnessed an outpouring of disgust at the killing fields of the
Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands where domestic livestock are
subjected to starvation each winter. It has been surprising to see Dutch
academics coming to its support but, fortunately, a dose of much needed
ecological common sense is on the horizon. If only this were the case in
so much else in ecological restoration. While wolves have almost completed
a return to free living across the whole of western continental Europe, a
nonsense proposal for Scotland comes along of utilising the predatory
traits of wolves by enclosing them and their prey inside fencing so that
it doesn’t disturb the locals.

I used to look every
day at Neil Fitzmaurice’s blog on the wild values of Blacka Moor, as I
found his writing inspiring and his photographs well illustrated the
points he wanted to make about the destruction of nature of this moor by
the local wildlife trust. Neil contacted me in 2005, and we established a
very fruitful cross fertilisation of views and information. This article
is a tribute to Neil, who died in mid-April

When I and others
where talking about setting up a science-based movement for rewilding, we
knew we had to reaffirm its origins in conservation biology to overcome
the massive drift in meaning that has happened from a self-interested free
for all. Having Michael Soulč on board when we set up the IUCN Rewilding
Task Force was an immense boost because he was instrumental in
establishing conservation biology in the 1980s, and in stewarding the
evolution of rewilding from it during the 1990s, along with his colleagues
in the Wildlands Project. It is a history of great and often voluntary
commitment to applying ecological concepts to action planning for the
continental conservation of wild nature in N. America. Conservation in
Britain seems so dull by comparison, but we too have an obligation to use
best science in the repair of our damaged and degraded ecosystems.

A zombie idea is one
that should be dead but is not. I recently came across this phrase and
realised it fitted absolutely with every logic failure I have ever come
across in mainstream conservation, and in the nonsense that has consumed
rewilding in Britain and Europe. If not me, then sufficient others have
refuted these logic failures in ecology, but nonetheless they relentlessly
survive because they suit a particular agenda. This is my list.

The long-awaited 25
Year Environment Plan for England turned out not to be a consultation
document when it was launched last month. It got a mixed reaction, was
short on detail, and had just the one big idea that would be monopolised
by the usual suspects of the conservation industry. Consultation is an
oozing sore – I found out after the event that my local authority were
carrying out a biodiversity scrutiny review, but I belatedly sent my views
about my local moor anyway, and how the burgeoning wildlife would be lost
there if it was managed back to its degraded state. This and the
underwhelming Plan made me think of the Addison Committee Report of the
1930’s and its disdain for real National Parks that would have given space
to wild nature. What were the organisations that influenced the Committee
to have this disdain? Disgracefully, they exist today as they are the
usual suspects of the conservation industry, and which still has an
overweening influence on the fate of wild nature.

There is a chunk of
this article that is missing. So many issues are paired up in my head that
it is hard to find space in an article after laying out the groundwork. I
feel the message of this article is important, as it lays down a standard
by which we can judge credible and honest ecological restoration, given
the restraint there is on the reinstatement of large carnivores. I also
explain how that restraint came about. The missing bit is an evaluation to
that standard of one of the most over-hyped examples of restoration. It
can wait.

Environmental
philosophy and ethics rarely get an outing in the practicalities of
ecological restoration. This is a regrettable omission since it means
there is little yardstick by which the restoration is informed of its
rightness, its appropriateness to the needs of wild nature, rather than
the convenience of the human species. Those key words of the title are
where the moral ethic for wild nature has to be determined, and where I
have sought enlightenment.

Here is an article
about the natural spread of carnivores across continental Europe that I
postponed from a couple of months ago. It was going to be about the wolf
and the jackal, but the tensions with wolves and attempts by rural
communities to thwart their distribution made them a more pressing issue
to understand. That redistribution is often posited with opportunities as
well as challenges, but it is the challenges that mostly grab the
headlines. Behind it all, though, are countries seeking to come to terms
with living with the wolf.

I always look for
interesting older books in second hand bookshops that may shed light on
earlier thinking on the threats to nature and its restoration. On the way
to the Northumbrian coastline for some more low-tide walking, I came
across a copy of the first Atlas of British Flora, being familiar with its
dot distribution maps for plants from a later atlas for West Yorkshire. It
was an intriguing glimpse of history, but also the opportunity for insight
into the geographical distribution of plants in Britain. I left the book,
but pondered on this indicative aspect of the plant Atlas while walking
the different zones of seaweeds and other marine flora and fauna in the
inter-tidal range of the coastline. I picked up the book on the way home
and work through here the significance of species distribution mapping has
for being indicative of the framework of wild nature.

I had planned this
article to be about the spectacle of sheep recently being grazed in a
public park in central London contrasted with the natural spread of
carnivores across continental Europe and our lack of those carnivores
here. The contrast seemed to me to demonstrate the paucity of aspiration
we have for wild nature, and which would only confuse a distinction
between domesticated animals and really wild ones. The article changed
direction when it became obvious that the paraded sheep were a metaphor
for the drift in meaning of “rewilding” when public parks have come to be
regarded as places to get away from farming only to see it imposed.
“Rewilding” should also be without farming, since truly wild land will
only occur if land is delinked from income. However, that drift now is to
be seen in fake farming being pushed as the norm for “rewilding”.

There’s nothing
worse than having a fabulous day out, making discoveries about marine wild
nature at low tide on a rocky shore, and then watching a wildlife program
on the seas that hasn’t got a clue what wild means, and which chucked that
word and wilderness around like confetti. The BBCs Wild UK series also
covered mountains, and it was so ghastly I had to peek through my fingers
to watch. Why is there such poor discrimination between what is and what
is not wild? In continental Europe, a wilderness characteristic is defined
by criteria and can be identified within existing protected areas. We need
to be far more robust here in that discrimination, and how we move towards
greater wildness.

I get so fed up with
superficial puff that rarely shines a light on wild nature. It would be
easy to say that it just plays into the hands of the conservation industry
and the herbivorists that their blandishments are never deeply analysed,
but I think it is just laziness as well – a lack of engagement. I think
the brilliance of wild nature is revealed in the detail, and it is the
detail – the evidence – that a science based movement for wilding is being
built, and shows that wilding does work in conserving wild nature.

I closed down and
became comfortably numb earlier this year, avoiding the situations that
would get at me. The scriptwriter in my head shadows my moods - it would
have a great career in mysteries and dramas. However, the closing down
came too late to stop the slide and fall into the grip of uncontrollable
anxiety. I just had great difficultly dealing with everyday problems and
uncertainties, my mind racing to conceive the worse, that everything will
go wrong. Partly it is life problems, partly it’s the accumulations of
years of dissatisfaction with the disregard of wild nature, and the
tortured emotions engendered. Self-help got me through it when it happened
30 years ago, stranded in a career I didn’t want. This time it will need
more than just resilience and resolve, and more than the Nature Cure that
Richard Mabey so ably described as his therapy.

Poor journalism on
nature has bugged me for many years, as has the nonsense of
conservationspeak and the overweening influence of the agriculture
industry on nature policy. All of these aspects came together one morning
in April when I listened to the radio news, and heard a BBC environment
analyst, a farmer and an employee of the Woodland Trust, trash the
findings of a study on woodland creation by the National Capital
Committee. They had read the findings in a leaked draft of the
Government’s 25 Year Environment Plan, but it was blindingly obvious that
none of them knew where the findings had come from or understood them.
ADDENDUM - May 2017. I have abstracted the pertinent commitments to
nature from the election manifestos of the three main parties in England.

There has been progress in doing the
necessary work in developing applications for the trial release of lynx in
Britain, and there is an interesting parallel between the Lynx UK Trust’s
proposals with the reinstatement of lynx in a transboundary Biosphere
Reserve that straddles France and Germany. However, before detailing this
positive outlook for lynx reinstatement here, it is put against the
backdrop of Steve Carver’s work in Mexico on bio-corridors for the large
carnivores. It is our commitment to trophic ecology and the critters – the
animals with claws – that are necessarily a crucial part of that.

There have always
been those who wish to downgrade the influence of large carnivores in the
ecology of trophic interaction. Often it is a strategy to place a greater
emphasis on the influence of herbivores - that it is resource limitation
that is the over-riding factor in the population dynamics of herbivores
rather than the effect of predation. More recently, a different approach
is being taken to diminish the role of large carnivores by suggesting that
because most of the studies from which our understanding on trophic
interaction are derived, are from predominantly natural landscapes,
particularly in America, and that these interactions may not hold in the
more anthropogenically altered landscapes, such as in Europe, where the
effects of predation are attenuated. So does this mean that there is no
point in having or reinstating large carnivores?

What started out as an
article about some 500 year-old laws that I had found that recognised the
impossibility of tree regeneration in the presence of grazing livestock,
turned into an introduction to a science-based movement on wilding that I
am involved in, as well as a recent review of large scale woodland
creation projects. We need to make more use of much larger areas in the
public domain, like the 600ha of regenerating native woodland on the
publicly owned Hardknott Forest of the Forestry Commission with its low
cost approach of natural regeneration and, where this is approach is not
possible, combined with a bit of public funding for the tree planting.

Sometimes the idea I have for an article has
to be scrapped because breaking news forces a different priority. I had
hoped to explore further the current situation of wolves in Europe, along
with the increasing distribution of golden jackal, looking for lessons to
be learnt as we consider reinstating former native species. However, the
report on the number of badgers culled between August and October last
year, combined with proposals for supplementary culling that will prolong
the slaughter, both released in mid-December, absolutely demanded
scrutiny. As it is, this culling of badgers – a state sponsored slaughter
of a protected species– has parallels to the illegal population control of
wolves in Scandinavia, where they are also a protected species.

Progress on wilding in
Britain is floundering for lack of a plan and a vision to back it up. A
few months ago, the parliamentary Environmental Audit Committee called for
written evidence on “managed rewilding”. It was no surprise to me that a
quarter of those who responded said there was confusion about the meaning
of “rewilding”. Amongst other things, a few organisations recognised the
need for a vision, policy and a strategic level in progressing wilding.
This will require a spatial view of what wild assets we have and where we
can build on. Back in 2004, while working in rural policy development for
a metropolitan authority, I made a proposal to map through an action
learning approach the districts ecological goods and services while
introducing concepts consistent with wilding, and develop a shared vision
for the future. An urgency is given to the need for this strategic level
for wilding by the momentous decision announced by the Scottish Government
at the end of November that beaver had been officially reinstated to least
a few small parts of its natural range. There should be a coalition of
interest for further release of beaver in Scotland that takes an action
learning approach to develop that clear view, a shared vision of a
natural, interconnected presence of beaver in Scotland, and which has a
plan and a spatial strategy to make it so.

A recent book about
the making of the British landscape brought forth a remarkable and
unexpected elision of ideas about the human experience of wilderness, as
it charts the return, when the cold receded after the last Ice Age, of
vegetation, animals and people across Doggerland and into southern
England. The continued warming and consequent rise in sea level resulted
in the inundation of Doggerland and Britain becoming an island. What do
these drowned lands tell us about the people who crossed Doggerland and
the wilderness in which they lived?

Worn down by feeling
each day that I have to fight against the forces of evil that are
destroying the prospect of wild land, instead I have asked myself who and
what is going to make a difference in Britain to the prospect of wild
nature? Could it be the environmental humanities as a cross over from the
predominantly ecological approach I take in envisioning wilder lands?
Could it be the new nature writers that have sprung up? What is it that
makes us more tolerant of living with the wild?

It has been
bothering me for some time why people’s perceptions of nature can be
totally divergent. It seems like there is a disconnection. It begs the
question of whether everyone is looking at the same nature: do some come
with preconceptions of what nature should be, and have the power to
enforce that; do others take on arguments about nature, but these are a
means to forestall change; or is nature perceived differently depending on
various abstractions, motivations, or connectedness to place? This could
be an issue of subjectivity, but I think it is a worse, a symptom of
wilful ignorance, and there are pressing examples that illustrate this.

I’m out on the sub-tidal fringe of the rock
platform below White Nab, just south of Scarborough, peering into kelp in
60cm of water and counting the sea urchins attached to the submerged rock.
I stopped counting at 20. However, while I delighted in this, the news of
the EU referendum had come that morning, and I was desperately thinking
what a withdrawal from the EU would mean for wild land in the UK. I
realised I had to look again at the Bern Convention, a supranational
agreement for protection of nature in Europe that we would still be party
to, and evaluate whether it held out any hope for influencing the prospect
of wild land here.

It seems to have become a habit opening
these articles by recounting the wild nature I have seen in the
intervening weeks. Partly it is a further exploration of
nature-connectedness, but it is also about the importance of articulating
the values of wild nature that I see at stake. The two locations this time
have in common that they are in national parks, but their wild nature owes
nothing to that. Nor will it in the future given the Governments recent
8-point plan for England’s national parks. Contrast this with Germany
where their national parks have large core areas that are not farmed and
which are expected to contribute to the national target area of 2% as
wilderness by 2020. These wilderness areas are also expected to be
evaluated for resettlement of more lynx and wolf in Germany. At least
there are those conscientiously seeking to reinstate lynx here, as the
stakeholder forum event of the Lynx UK Trust showed.

I am so tired of having to be critical of a
mainstream conservation dogma that is so insubstantially warranted that it
should have dissolved away by now. In the same way, I’m tired of being
bogged down in the mess that is “rewilding” now, trying to inject some
sanity, and while I still have some unfinished business on that, I long to
get back on to an exploration of nature connectedness over the coming
months. That I have unfinished business, even despite expending so much
effort on it recently, is a need to ever more to puncture the conceit that
continually refashions and reimages what is essentially just conservation
grazing as being some wildland panacea. Tensions are created by the
projects supported by "Rewilding" Britain seemingly facing in opposite
directions. There is a lack of distinction of this in terms of a coherent
approach to ecological restoration, and which could be resolved through
recognising differentiation along the wildland spectrum.

It is common to see
short, critical, replies to papers in the follow up issue of a journal,
the authors of the original article getting the chance to rebut the
criticism. It is however not often that a major paper critical of a
particular trend comes out of the blue, and without seemingly any
provocation. Thus in February, a scathing attack was launched on “rewilding”,
a couple of the paper’s authors having a significant track record in
scientific research. I was asked to contribute to a rebuttal, but there
was no way I was going to defend what “rewilding” has become, when what it
needs is a rehabilitation from the “rewilding without predators”
identified by the authors, and back to the cores-corridors-carnivores
approach of its original meaning.

I have to nail this
nonsense of the conservation industry that disturbance events – or natural
processes as they would call them – are missing from our wild nature and
thus need to be externally applied. I alluded to this last time when I
described the disturbance processes that exist within my local woodland,
but then went on instead to write about the joys I find in nature. The
intent was there again with this article, but it took a different
direction. I walked the low tide rock platforms on the N Yorkshire coast a
few weeks ago, and was again astonished by the wild nature there and how
it exists in one of the more extreme, natural disturbance regimes of tides
and waves. The coastal cliff slopes that back these rocky platforms
exhibit an instability that is not just from wave action, but also from
the hydrology of the land behind the cliff top. If use of that land
creates an artificial hydrology, then the instability from this is also
artificial. So why does the conservation industry describe it as natural?

This month’s article was going to be a slam
on the nonsense of external disturbance having to be applied to natural
systems or they would be not be natural. You guessed it, that disturbance
is a surrogate for the one-eyed rubbish that believes there isn’t enough
conversion of biomass to excrement. I couldn’t face it – to explain the
logic fault in this rubbish means having to engage with it – again! So
instead, I wrote about the joys I find in wild nature, and how I
understand my emotional reaction to it. Though not usually given to
philosophic analyses, I find the work of philosophers Emerson, Murdoch and
Rolston immensely helpful in this.

There is a cycle of self-justifying invention and delusion, a continual
bending of reality when it comes to the free for all that characterises
those who pursue a dogma about the natural world, or who want to create
new ecologies wherever the whimsy takes them, and with little to
substantiate their choices. This free for all characterises the constant
evolution of the next justifying excuse for persecuting woodland; the
quest to prove the natural provenance of sloppy peat bogs; and the
herbivore driven “rewilding” that is used it to sidestep any
responsibility for the consequences of millennia of unrestrained,
domesticated herbivory and the associated persecution of both plants and
animals.

I went along to a
“Rewilding” Landscapes Group meeting of “Rewilding” Britain in
mid-November, where we were to discuss the greater detail needed for
operational delivery by the charity, and to help distinguish RB’s position
from other approaches. We went through, to varying depths, the challenges,
operational definitions for the outcome of “rewilding” and for the process
of “rewilding”, as well as deciding which “rewilding” projects to support.
However, the abiding thought I had was if we are to have ecological
restoration on a large scale, how do we get access to non-farmed land in
what is essentially a privately-owned and farmed landscape in the UK. It
is still the case that the hegemony of farming chooses what may live and
what dies. Recent evidence suggests this is forcing reinstatement of
former native species, as well as redistribution of species persecuted
into diminishing exile and refuge, in to sub-optimal habitat for reasons
of safety in the face of potential persecution, and this because it is in
to large areas of land that we have in public ownership.

The wilderness class has a seminar topic each week where we discuss the
outcome of their independent study. Its a challenge to them to find
information and consider its relative merit and meaning, and so I often
give them controversial topics, no more so than the contemporary obsession
with trying to recreate the extinct aurochs so that there is some kind of
legitimacy for those who want to cover the whole of Europe in excrement.
So-called wild horse are also pressed to this obsession, but increasingly
it is also the European bison. The difficulty the obsessives have, is that
the bison was not universally distributed across Europe, and especially
not in the Netherlands, nor England. As the seminar topic revealed, there
is a confidence trick that is being played on us by this advocacy that is
only caught out in discovering the meretricious way in which falsities in
fact about bison distribution are propagated and then relied on.

I can’t get away
from what Americans call conservation reliance, the dependency of some
species on continued intervention to maintain their populations,
irrespective of whether their presence at the managed location represents
a natural distribution. At its apex is the self-justifying view that human
transformed landscapes are so much better, that ecological restoration
would throw away the gains from the simplification in agro-ecological
systems. I was thus not hugely looking forward to giving a talk to
Yorkshire Wildlife Trust staff on ecological restoration (they called it “rewilding”)
but the field visits in the Ingleborough NNR as part of their away days
were areas that are a study of mine. Who knows whether trashing the whole
basis of nature conservation in Britain is the most effective argument for
ecological restoration? However, what had been a vote against ecological
restoration on the first day turned into a vote for it after my talk.

I set a challenge last
time for all of us who seek a future for wild nature in Britain. It is
clear to me that the ecological incompleteness of Britain, the absence of
top predators, is the major issue for restoration of wildness, and which I
have increasingly addressed over the years. While I have drawn extensively
from the experience of America, there is always the criticism that it has
no lessons for the ecology of Britain. Thus most of what I have written
recently has been based on evidence from continental Europe, helped by the
research that I did for writing a book chapter on the ecological values of
Europe’s wilderness. However, there are as yet no studies from Europe that
show the effect of predators on vegetation through the mediation of
herbivore pressure, and thus I have still to turn to America. The natural
recourse is to Yellowstone, but there are rumblings over whether there is
a real recovery of vegetation in Yellowstone, and if it can be ascribed to
a behaviourally mediated trophic cascade initiated by the return of
wolves, or if there are other factors involved. We can also learn the
lessons from the Rocky Mountain National Park where I first heard in 2003
about the need to restore wolves to overcome the degradation caused by the
burgeoning elk population. Eventually, the park decided against wolf
reinstatement, and for culling and fencing-off the aspen and willow, but
can you substitute the ecological function of wolves by these surrogates
that are presumed to serve the same function?

I don’t seem to have
been able to get away from the “r-word” these last few months. I met up
with a Canadian TV crew towards the end of May that were filming a
one-hour TV documentary on Rewilding. They had been to the
Oostvardersplassen (OVP) in the Netherlands with Frans Vera, and to a
private reserve in Portugal with Rewilding Europe (RE). We talked about
the ecological illiteracy that is represented by the experiment at OVP,
and how it is a shifting sand of misrepresentation and justification by
Vera, who shrugs off the high, year on year death rate of the deer, cattle
and horses from starvation. I also discussed RE with the producer, its
concentration on abandoned farmland, their rewilding based on one
strategy, the appliance of herbivory. In none of this is true ecological
restoration taking place – where is the assistance in the recapture of
species lost due to simplification of ecology from agriculture, the
necessary return of natural vegetation? I think the word rewilding has
been made toxic by their actions having monopolised a definition of it,
and which has not been matched with sufficient countering that there has
to be restoration of completely functional ecological systems, at all
trophic levels, and not just with herbivores. I must take some of the
blame for the disastrous erosion of the meaning of rewilding, and the
consequences it has for wild nature. I have to say that I have not been
very effective in influencing the formation of Rewilding Britain (RB)
which recently launched. It is hard to see that the broad church of
interest that is currently associated with RB can be accommodated within a
high aspiration for natural vegetation, but without compromising it.

In a book from 1970,
Jean Dorst traced man's assault on nature by continents, listing them in
the chronological order of their devastation. He recognised the impact of
even primitive man in his use of fire, but saw a threshold in effect as
being the transformation from hunter and berry-gatherer to shepherd and
farmer. Against the backdrop of disaster that he records, including the
extinction of hundreds of forms of birds and animals, the abuse of
pesticides, and pollution of land, sea and air, Dorst believed that as
well as leaving aside areas in public control, where it is forbidden to
modify habitats or to disturb flora and fauna in any way, there also had
to be a reconciliation of man and nature, and
rational use of the land and sea.
There will be those who will argue that the use of traditional knowledge,
especially of indigenous people, will be implicit in approaches to
rational use. However, that which is put forward as traditional
knowledge/wisdom/use is often very fluid. It certainly needs serious
critical evaluation before it has any widespread contemporary role,
particularly when there are pressures to blur the line of nature
protection by the advocacy of its use in conservation.

I walked my first coastal rainforest in a
national park on the west coast of Vancouver Island, Canada. It was a
fabulous place, dripping with ferns and mosses. I didn't know at the time
that parts of the west coast of Britain had been identified as a location
for coastal temperate rainforest, and that a case had been made for the
importance of Britain’s coastal temperate rainforest as being of
considerable interest to world conservation. I have always been drawn to
wet woodland, and walked a couple on the coast of Snowdonia in March
before spending a week walking the Atlantic hazelwood and oakwoods around
Oban on the west coast of Scotland. These were fabulous woodlands, full of
oceanic mosses, liverworts and lichens, their presence indicating the
ecological continuity that comes from a lack of disturbance, and which
alert us to the importance that native vegetation and natural forces have
in our understanding of natural processes. I also observed the impact of
beaver at the official trial release site. I couldn’t help but think that
beaver will be the next big story for woodland and herbivore dynamics
after deer.

Having researched the
experience of France in the return of lynx there, I have been waiting for
the Lynx UK Trust to reveal the results of an opinion survey on their
proposals for trial releases of lynx in Scotland and England before I
could finish an article about the potential difficulties that could
encountered and what we could learn from France. Postponed from their
original deadline because of being bumped by the BBC, the initial results
show an overwhelming support amongst the public for the proposals, and
since responses from people in rural communities were over-represented in
the data, then this poll cannot be accused of an urban fantasy.
Lynx in the Vosges mountains have a hard time from illegal killing by
hunters, and are failing to establish. Their dire situation has mobilised
public support in France, with calls for a national plan for lynx (as
there is for wolf there) actively seeking and punishing perpetrators of illegal shooting,and measures to educate farmers on how to take responsibility for the
protection of their livestock from predation. This public support is seen
in the context of participatory democracy, something that is lacking here
when considering the reactionary forces that are ranged against against
wild nature. In gauging the overwhelming public support, the Lynx UK Trust
has let the cat out of the bag for lynx reinstatement and contributed to
that participatory democracy,

Carrifran Wildwood was
an obvious choice in seeking a new location for the Leeds student field
trip, now that the idiots have turned the whole of the Ennerdale valley
into a cattle farm. A group of us went up to Carrifran last September to
check for local hostel accommodation and reacquaint ourselves with the
valley. We had a very enjoyable day, seeing the undoubted progress in tree
growth since we were last there six years ago. The developing canopy
formed by the earliest plantings showed evidence of the resultant shade
exerting an influence on the ground layer, and tree growth stretching up
the valley is now a significant part of the visual scene. The ecological
restoration in the valley is an inspiring story, of a clarity of vision
that was brought to colourful life in a book written by the Wildwood
Group. Coming back from Carrifran, I kept thinking how lucky I was to live
with so much ancient woodland within walking distance from my back door,
and then I had a hammering blow - man with chainsaw had been
felling trees along the beck in one of those local woodlands. It was a
poor job, creating a very unwelcome visual intrusion and cutting short the
contribution these trees would have made to standing deadwood in the
woodland. When I had calmed down, I determined to hold to account the
judgement that had led to management operations in the wood, and the
insensitivity of the work done.

The section of the
Infrastructure Bill on provisions for control of non-native species
underwent a series of amendments in response to the criticisms that had
been made in Committee stage and by the conservation industry. The
amendments clarified the difference between a former native species and a
non-native species, removing the former from the provisions for control if
they had been lawfully released. The native species that were subject to
licensing for their release were also removed from the provisions for
control. If I expected a chorus of approval from the conservation
industry, then I was deafened by the silence. Except that ClientEarth, a
group of environmental lawyers, produced a detailed criticism that was
full of logic failures. In effect, not a great deal was changed in the
outcome of the Act by the amendments, but it has certainly paved the way
for a major rewrite of our wildlife Act. It has also shone a spotlight on
the fact we are letting the situation with wild boar and eagle owl drift,
rather than put some effort in to resolving their situation.

Over the last few
months, I've been steadily exploring the potential ecological restoration
of Britain, identifying what is missing, what can be reinstated and what
natural processes will ensue. I am never one to offer facile solutions.
There has to be plausibility, even if the aim seems out of reach. Thus
when I argue for the return of the wolf to Britain, it is not in
vainglory, but in a serious and reasoned judgement. We need to see the
example of how others live in coexistence with large predators to overcome
the usual limited horizons and the inability to shake off stolid
preconceptions that plague British thought. France offers that example,
the wolf having returned naturally in 1992, but its presence is still
being opposed. We also need to understand the regulatory framework for
reinstatement of former native species, since it is in that where the most
persuasive argument has to be made. UPDATE - 22 Feb: Opinion survey
dispels myth that support for wolves in France is only from urban people.

While I was researching
habitat fragmentation and its effect on mammal species, I saw the skeleton
of an Irish Elk in Leeds City Museum. This giant deer died out many
thousands of years ago, the victim of a sharp return to icy conditions
that destroyed the lush forest and edge habitats, replacing them with
tundra and steppe vegetation that could not fulfil its specialised diet.
If the giant deer had found some refuge during that cold spell, then they
would have been able to survive until the equally abrupt upturn in
temperature and accompanying return of lush vegetation. This made me
wonder what the fragmentation of habitat today would be like through the
eyes of the giant deer. It made me think that humans, as the exceptional
species, have the ability to fragment and degrade habitat to the same
extent as that abrupt drop in temperature. So what does this habitats
fragmentation mean for mammals today? Is the ecology we study here just a
series of artefacts, so that what we are seeing is the result of enforced
habitat and dietary changes by mammals as a pragmatic response for
survival?

The wildcat in Scotland
offered me a great opportunity to focus on at least one species as an
inspiration in recommendations I made for the future for Scotland’s
wildland, and I tied its fortunes into the development of ecological
networkng in Forest Habitat Networks. However, the glacial pace of
official moves to protect the wildcat have come in for increasing
criticism, and the recent identification of six priority areas in Scotland
was poorly done. A focal species approach is a useful way through which to
explore the ecology of our natural processes and its complexities in
nature-led land. Looking at the wildcat, pine martin and nightjar, it
becomes clear that a three dimensional vegetation structure is important
for those focal species, and thus for natural processes. Because of their
greater trophic need, the missing large carnivores will be going for
larger prey, and so we need to adjust our calibration for the scale at
which they operate, and how we see them reinstated in our landscapes.

There's an endless
round of media articles and panel discussions about reinstating wolf, lynx
and bear to Britain, but little sense that there is an understanding of
the ecological function of these large carnivores, or that their
reinstatement is ecologically necessary for a return of natural processes.
Often, the depth of understanding is just of a restocking of the landscape
zoo, but only if the returnees can be confined and well behaved, so that
they don’t inconvenience us. More often than not, greater sanity is
displayed by non-professionals, their genuine interest less burdened with
the baggage of vested interest. It may just be people like that who will
have to do the work to make the case for reinstatement, since it doesn’t
seem that our statutory nature agencies will take a lead, supported by
Government. They are likely to continue with the panacea here for natural
processes of the unrestrained herbivory of domestic livestock. So what are
the positive ecological relationships associated with top carnivores in
Europe, and what is to fear about their return?

I was interviewed by
Canadian author James MacKinnon for a book he was writing about the loss
of wild nature, and then forgot all about it until a copy arrived from him
through the post. I read the book, and then immediately read it again. It is a
fascinating account of species loss across time and space, and of the
seeming myopia that we have for this loss. Like George Monbiot, MacKinnon
also sees extinct elephants as having been ecosystem engineers. I don't
doubt an impact, but it is always seen in isolation of the really scary
predators that existed, and which are also extinct. Monbiot believes we
have an elephant adapted temperate ecosystem, based on certain properties
of trees. However, there are other properties of trees that suggest they
did not evolve solely on the basis of being bashed over by elephants, but
on their ability to capture sunlight when growing in spatial combination.
This apart, MacKinnon imagines a large, undiscovered island, and posits
this as a challenge for us to consider how we would make a better go of
living with a wilder land base. It is a brilliant challenge, MacKinnon
rehearsing some of the choices he would make. If I stumbled across such an
island, I wonder whether I would tell anyone else about it, but if I did,
I would make sure they read MacKinnon’s book before they set foot on it.
ADDENDUM - Nov 2014 The program on "rewilding" comparing the
Netherlands with Canada was broadcast on 24 November. It has a section
where Anik See, Frans Vera and myself talk about the Oostvaardersplassen
in the Netherlands. I don’t think I’m going to be allowed into the
Netherlands ever again! Within days, I was teaching students about the
ecological illiteracy of enclosing herbivores behind fencing at
Oostvaardersplassen and without any natural control mechanism for their
grazing and population explosion. Since 2005, about 8,000 animals have
died of starvation, more than twice the number of animals there are there
now.

I had an interesting
exchange with Ian Machacek about the reasons for the high woodland cover
in SE England, eventually alighting on the correlation between the
agricultural value of the land and woodland cover. Where the land was
good, forest was cleared. It was ever thus and in fact the origins of the
word field is felled! Willem Riehl, a German writing in the mid-1800s,
considered that too much forest in England had been turned into fields.
He considered that forests and forest villages were
where human development existed within the limits imposed by nature, and that this was the key to the national
character of Germany. Was he right about England? Many advances were made
over the nineteenth century in understanding the factors affecting the
distribution of species in natural plant communities, leading eventually
in 1904 to the first vegetation survey of Britain on the basis of phyto-geography
and phytosociology. Unfortunately the survey was carried out at the point
when we had the lowest ever woodland cover. What would the natural
vegetation cover of England be today if it could develop without our
interference, and what does it say about what we have to do to regain our
natural heritage?

Insincerity is never
far from the conservation industry, sometimes cynical, it can also be
evidence of a willful ignorance. It is the latter that characterises the
splutterings arising from the provisions on invasive species in the
Infrastructure Bill currently passing through Parliament. I looked at the
Bill a month before the conservation industry started scaremongering about
it, and found no sinister purpose. As the splutterings surfaced, I looked
again at the Bill, and confirmed that many of the accusations made against
it were false – there has just been no effort to understand the background
to the provisions, nor understand what will be the outcome of the
legislation. It will not affect the reinstatement of former native
species. It will not put the native species on Schedule 9 of the Wildlife
and Countryside Act 1981 under threat, as most of them are protected at
all times under special penalty in Schedule 1 of the Act. It does not seek
to redefine what are and are not native species, only have a process of
identifying those species that can be subject to species control orders.

There was a rare example of a newspaper
article last September that gave a comprehensible explanation of a trophic
cascade. John Finnemore linked research about a trophic cascade between
sea otters and eelgrass beds off the coast of California with his
dissatisfaction at the ecological illiteracy of the badger culling that
had just got underway in England. I wonder if Finnemore knew that there
had actually been a number of studies on the ecological consequences of
removing badgers, because they were mostly ignored anyway even though they
also were rare examples where ecological principles were considered. This
is frustrating, because England does have in Darwin and Elton a heritage
of two of the key authors on the evolution of trophic interaction. It is
depressing also that while Denmark and the Netherlands have recently
anticipated and planned for return of wolves, we just trip over the
reinstatement of beaver, while continuing with a crushing
lack of aspiration, and a lack of terminology in our nature conservation
legislation that reflects the reality of natural systems. France has
recognised this omission, and is doing something about it.

A field trip to a Scottish National
Nature Reserve made me uncomfortable about the level of deer culling that
was being carried out so that regeneration of birch woodland could take
place. I wondered what alternatives there were, including whether deer are
actually deterred from returning to an area if all they witness is another
animal being shot, rather than the more traumatic experience of being
hunted by wolves, but getting away - the landscape of fear. A few weeks
later, I walked Tomies Wood in the Killarney National Park in Ireland.
This wood, while it had fabulous old oaks, was overgrazed by sika deer as
there was no bramble, pathetically small woodrush, and no evidence of
regeneration of trees. Fenced exclosures seemed to be the only way that
the death of this chewed up woodland could be avoided. The control
mechanisms of natural processes require that species are present in all
trophic levels, and this includes the top predators like wolf and lynx. A
recent Europe wide spatial study identified potential core habitat areas
for large forest-bound mammals, using the lynx as the focal species. Two
areas were identified in Britain, but both of them were conifer
plantations, rather than native deciduous woodland. Where could lynx be
reintroduced, do we need greater woodland cover, and where could that be?

I have been planning for some time to
visit a woodland that was my playground before I started going to school.
I have never been back after we moved a short distance away nearly 50
years ago. I have memories of my mum showing me the wildflowers there, and
I think when I did start at infants school, it was possible to walk all
the way through this woodland and the next one. I was not disappointed -
Tips Copse is a lovely, ancient woodland, full of woodland wildflowers. I
also revisited another woodland of my youth where I camped as a scout, and
found it plagued by the dogma of the conservation industry, of felling and
coppicing. I also had an expectation of two locations where I hoped they
had succeeded to woodland in the intervening years. In the case of an area
of old gravel pits, this had happened, but not so at a military training
area where the colonisation with trees and shrubs had occurred but was
reversed in pursuit of another dogma, this time heathland. In
gathering my thoughts about these woodland places, I learned much more
about the area I grew up than I expected. I recognised two wooded
corridors of about two miles each that align along water courses, and
which have a large element of public ownership. They are not wild, but
they inspire thoughts of a large component of new woodland creation, with
predominantly natural colonisation, as the basis of wilder landscapes,
ADDENDUM - Jan 2017 A chance search-hit on my website led me to
find a community history project where people who lived near the woodland
location that was my scout campsite told of their wartime stories of the
1940s, and which included memories of an army camp in the woods and a
number of anti-aircraft guns. This explained the marking of huts in the
wood on a map from 1942, as it also explained that the open space in the
wood had nothing to do with coppicing, but was the result of woodland
clearance to make way for the erection of that hut complex and the
activity associated with it.

I had great fun last year visiting
exhibitions of landscape paintings in Leeds and London, and then spending
a day in the National Gallery in Washington. The Leeds exhibition set out
with the premise that British landscape art was not all it seemed, and
this stayed with me as I saw more exhibitions. Given the time and distance
to put it all into perspective, I think the traditions that grew up around
landscape painting in Britain have contributed to the false impression of
our modified and degraded landscapes as desirable, and consequently there
is a paucity of aspiration for the wild nature of our land. The
idealised pastorality of so many of these paintings just hides and
obscures the extent to which they are degraded. It is a sad fact that the public beliefs of
many, over history, are shaped by observing the attitudes of the loudest
voices, rather than through their own logic or argument.

Needing to cheer myself up, I re-read an article by
Peter Rhind from 10 years ago that proposed a new category of nature
reserve - an Untamed Nature Reserve. Peter felt that naturalness
was missing from our landscapes, as it was in consideration of what nature
conservation was about. He argued that naturalness resulted from lack of
human intervention, and that both the level of naturalness and the
time free from
human influence were important. This thought-provoking article has guided
me over the years, and reading it again reminded me that I had collected
various snippets of information that were relevant to untamed nature. At
the time of first reading, Peter and I had discussed setting up a type of
Wildlands Project for the UK, but we soon found out that others were
setting up a Wildland Network. It was a mistake to have instead
joined with that, because the clear vision that Peter and I had was
frustrated by the lack of aspiration of WN. Now, 10 years on from those
discussions with Peter, another group is on the horizon wanting to give it
a go.

I went away to walk the beaches at low tide on the
Northumberland coast to regain some equilibrium after being deeply
offended by the accusations of cherry picking of evidence levelled by
academic colleagues against those who sought to engage with the issues of
the recent flooding. It just seemed arrogance when they were ignorant
about ecological restoration, and were unlikely to have had any track
record in civil engagement. It made me consider my own track record, and
took me back 14 years when the valley below where I live flooded, how the
District came to terms with that, and how I got involved. It became a
personal study to follow developments on flooding and river management in
my back yard of Yorkshire, seeing the repeating pattern of optimism about
changes in land use being potentially effective, but coming up against the
unwillingness of farmers. But it is not just farmers when the fetishising
of open landscape species by the conservation industry blights any
real debate
about changes in land use.

I wrote last June, just after publication of George
Monbiot’s book, about some of the feedback I had given him on reading a
draft, and of our further correspondence. I felt then that there was too
much of a temptation to compare versions for the feedback I had given him,
and so I left reading the published version of the book for some months
before I would considered reviewing it. Now I think a review is such a
small thing when reflections better represent the life the book has had
before and after its publication. In Feral, Monbiot powerfully asserts a
space for our thinking on wildness, where trophic diversity is the
essential characteristic, and trophic cascades are its inherent ecological
processes. This is the highly important, breakthrough context of the book.

I
get to look back at the beginning of this website, the first two years
when I wrote about the wild places that I had found, and how I
wanted others to have the opportunity to experience them. Then another
purpose developed after the influence of two people, that of documenting
the discontent of local communities at the slavish ideology of the
conservation industry that destroys much of our wilder nature. Wild Park
is just such an example of this killing of wildness, but what also is
exposed is that the conservation industry disregards regulatory processes
when it doesn't suit them, such as obtaining the necessary felling
licence, and that in the face of opposition, it contrives some bogus
process that it can claim shows support for their proposals. As is
inevitable, HLS funding is the bribe that is driving all this.

For some time now, I have wanted to explain why I don’t use
the word rewilding anymore. I believe it is a term that has been hijacked
to become a toxic reminder of the worst aspects of the noosphere. A better
expression would be ecological restoration, but even that is now being put
into use by the rewilding-by-grazers, so that every phrase we may have
used, is becoming useless to us: rewilding, wilded, natural processes,
ecological restoration. One of the main culprits for this twisted ideology
is the spectacularly misnamed "Rewilding" Europe. They have other sinister
and despicable acts to be accountable for as well.

I
kept putting off writing this article as I knew it would be distasteful
having to review all the evidence I had accumulated on what is a misuse of
public money, and then make a coherent story out of it. It is bad enough
that the conservation industry pursues its own, selfish agenda, but to
have it publicly funded is a moral corruption too far. I had to resort to
Freedom of Information requests to find out the truth behind what are
often unthinking applications of dogmatic but often damaging management,
especially at Allerthorpe Common, Sound Common, Longmoor Common and
Baildon Moor, driven by this agri-environment funding and the
unscrutinised agenda of Natural England. The examples I give
indicate that HLS has replaced Government funding for nature. It is no
longer solely an agri-environment scheme, as a significant part of it is
increasingly having nothing to do with agriculture. It shows the moral
corruptness of HLS and the people who administer it.

It had been five years since I last walked wilderness in
America, and so it was time for another trip. As I would be speaking at
the Wild Nephin conference in Ireland, which was about wilderness in
modified landscapes, it seemed a good choice to visit and learn from the
wilderness in eastern America. These lands had suffered more human
modification from farming and logging than the iconic wildlands of the
west, but had undergone a process of ecological restoration over the 20th
century as those activities were progressively withdrawn. I also
wanted to walk in deciduous forest for a change, as the west is
predominantly conifer. Walking
Shenandoah National Park on the Blue Ridge Mountains, and Dolly Sods
Wilderness in the Monongahela National Forest on the Allegheny Mountains,
and then learning their histories, gave me much to think about. While I
was away, George Monbiot’s book Feral was published, and so I missed the
buzz around it, but I had read a draft last year, and came back interested
to see what changes he had made.

I have been re-reading my bookshelf, and
finding I get a lot more out of the books on second reading. Partly its do
to with my greater knowledge now, picking up on things this time that I
may not not have seen as significant before. The books of Richard Mabey in
particular have been rewarding, and especially the journeys of
discovery of the innateness of woodland in Beechcombings that I seem
unwittingly to have mirrored. Within days of each other, and with my
re-reading of the book, I walked two woodlands, one new to me, but both in
which the recent heavy handed management had rally trashed the woodland
feel for me. The new woodland - Bushy
Hazels and Cwmma Moors, owned by the National Trust - got my attention as it was a Ratcliffe
wood, listed in the review of nature conservation sites that Ratcliffe
edited in 1977, and which is a useful list of over 200 graded woodlands.
The other - Grass Wood - is one I walk regularly, but with increasing
trepidation, as it is being routinely trashed during the dormant season by
Yorkshire Wildlife Trust. Grass Wood was on the first list in Britain of
potential nature reserves drawn up in 1915, and is a Ratcliffe
wood, as well as a reference wood for the National Vegetation
Classification for woodland. In spite of all this, the wood is being
re-industrialised and is more like a wood yard than wild nature. In stark
contrast, the adjacent Lower Grass Wood is owned by the Woodland Trust,
which has a long term objective of minimum intervention, accepting what's
there, and accepting natural regeneration without management as the way
woodland will be retained on this site.

Its rare to see Natural England exhibiting a
single moment of introspection about its function, and having opened
itself to one weighty critic, it soon rationalised away what was a
difficult message for it. At heart was quite a radical criticism of the
approach Natural England takes to nature conservation. That they are
trying to offer up a new context for a very old story is the burgeoning
interest in large scale conservation, commissioning research and
scheduling a meeting in London in late March. Except that the meeting is
by invitation only, and consists of the main recipients of agri-environment funding, and who are thus willingly
compliant with the conservation agenda of Natural England. As I have
pointed out, nature conservation appears now to be in the unaccountable
control of the conservation industry. This transfer or appropriation of
state function to non-state actors has been described as the
neoliberalisation of nature conservation. The attempts to conjure up
heathland at Bitchet Common by Kent Wildlife Trust, aided by Natural
England, is a classic example of this. ADDENDUM - Mar 2013 The
main conclusions of the meeting had to be that there is no evidence that
agri-environment funding delivers benefits at a landscape scale, and the
overlap between different large scale initiatives, mostly NGO-driven (eg.
Living Landscapes, Futurescapes, Butterfly Conservation, River
Restoration, HLS Target Areas etc) creates a very confusing picture that
is evidence of a lack of coordination, the duplication being very
difficult to defend - or even explain! ADDENDUM - July 2015 The meeting
report is finally published, and is a reminder of some of the more ghastly
speeches and case studies. Natural England is developing a vision for its
Conservation Strategy, the paper being presented at a recent Board
meeting. It would have been interesting to have seen whether the report on
large-scale conservation had had an influence on that strategy. However,
unlike in previous years, Board papers are no longer publicly available,
but the minutes of the Board meeting show that the
neoliberalisation of conservation through the stolidity of
eschewing national responsibility remains, and that Unnatural England
Board meetings are still a pleasure ground of reactionary forces.

A lot of my interest in wild land across the
countries of Europe is bound up in their national legislation for
protected areas. Without that legislation, and the strict protection it
gives to some of its designated areas, then that wild land characteristic
would be lost from the exploitive extraction that inevitably is human use
- some areas must be free of that human extractive use. It was, of course,
a central theme in the report I wrote for the Scottish Government on the
status and conservation of wild land in Europe. Events move on, and a
report like that needs updating as well as expansion when new information
comes along. I produced a supplement to the report when I was pressed to
provide further information on the relationship between Natura 2000 sites
and national protected areas. The European Environment Agency then
produced a report that covers some of that ground, and so I was interested
to see what they came up with. There are a number of
over-reaches in the EEA report, along with quite a few errors, not least
in spelling my name wrong.

It was a shock to to realise the probable
impact of ash dieback disease when I first read about it at the beginning
of October. I have lived during the time of a wide-ranging tree disease
before. Dutch Elm Disease cleared the landscape of southern England of its
English elm, but it wasn't a feature of where I grew up on the coast.
However, living in the north now, I see the evidence of the disease in the
decaying stumps of Wych elm. It does not kill the tree, as new stems pop
up until they too are eventually infected. But the Wych elm seeds well in
my local woodland, and will not be lost as long as seeds are produced. The
outlook for ash is less certain, and the impact of the disease has not
been rationally discussed. Ash can be the predominant tree in woodland. I
have explored many of these wonderful ash woods on limestone pavements. It
is these woodlands where the impact will be greatest, and I want to say
goodbye to the ash there before the disease takes hold. I am particularly
sad about where ash has led the ecological restoration of limestone
pavements after sheep grazing has been removed. The amazing
transformations in floristic diversity may be lost in such places when ash
dieback takes hold. ADDENDUM - Jan 2013 Research has been
commissioned on ash dieback, to inform policy and decision making. Amongst
the questions are a number that I started to address, and particularly in concerns for the
future of ash woods on limestone pavements. The
emphasis of the research effort, as evidenced by the allocation of the
funding available, is on questions that could appear to foresee a future
without ash, its place taken by other trees.

Earlier this year, I came
across an extraordinary report written in 1865 by Frank Law Olmsted, the
landscape architect who had designed the layout of Central Park in New
York. It was a preliminary plan for Yosemite Valley, written after the
Valley had been granted to the State of California by the Federal
Government. I was so taken with Olmsted’s report that I challenged
colleagues on whether they could identify the authorship of such sentiment
for public accessibility to natural scenery. A name given to me was Robert
Hunter, a co-founder of the National Trust, but it was for his earlier
involvement as the honorary solicitor for the Commons, Open Spaces and
Footpaths Preservation Society, and his opposition to the enclosure of
Epping Forest, a Royal hunting Forest. It would seem that this action to
prevent enclosure of Epping Forest is regarded as a significant event in
the nineteenth century, in securing public access to open space. At first,
I thought it would be a fascinating juxtaposition to the grant of Yosemite
and Olmsted’s report on the management of the valley. However, the more I
looked in to it, the more it seemed to reveal divergent aims and entirely
different outcomes. While I was researching Epping Forest, I kept thinking
about the parallels with Rock Creek Park in Washington DC. While it may be
somewhat unfair to contrast the natural aspect of Rock Creek Park with
Epping Forest, the spirit of wildland coupled with the absolute commitment
to public access that so infected the ethos of open space in America then
as now, makes Epping Forest a very pale comparison.

The endless procession of proposals to
enfence commons and reintroduce livestock grazing continues unabated. It
is driven by agri-environment funding in what has become the business
model of the conservation industry in England. It struck me that these new
enclosures were the same threat to freedoms to that of the original
enclosures of 18-19th century England. The poet John Clare often railed
against enclosure in his poems after his personal experience of the loss
of freedom in the countryside he grew up in, and which suffered at the
hands of the Helpstone and District enclosure Act of 1809. The New
Enclosures, though, are also about the loss of freedoms arising from the
transfer of the control of the public realm into the hands of the
unaccountable third sector of the conservation industry, such as the
eastern Moors and Sheffield Moors at the edge of the Peak District. After
the Independent Panel on Forestry’s report, I fear that the Public Forest
Estate in England is also to be offloaded into unaccountable hands. The
physical obstruction wrought by the New Enclosures is exemplified by the
recent proposals to fence off and graze Loxley and Wadsley commons. The
inevitability of these proposals coming just four years after the outcry
over the butchering of thousands of trees on the commons in the pursuit of
heathland, is crushing, much as enclosure likely crushed the spirit of
Clare.

It’s easy to plan a walking trip in
the wilds of America, less so for the wilds of Europe. However, I
discovered some years ago that the nature reserves and National Parks in
Ireland are principally state-owned and managed by the National Parks and
Wildlife Service. Moreover, the NPWS aspires to have proper National Parks
rather than the privately owned farmland of ours. The NPWS
provides wildlife and access information about the Parks and
reserves, and so I planned a walking trip from amongst them. I was
particularly interested to walk some of the woodland nature reserves, as
they are renowned in western Ireland for the richness of their ferns and
mosses. Ireland has a public forest estate of plantation woodland managed
by Coillte, and which has a strong emphasis on recreation through its
forest recreation areas and forest parks, and so I added to my list from
amongst those as well. The two weeks of walking took me the whole length
of Ireland on its western side, from the coast in Co Cork in the south,
all the way up to the coast in Co Donegal in the north. I also arranged to
meet Bill Murphy, Head of Recreation at Coillte, who showed me around
Nephin Forest, a plantation in Co Mayo that is to be turned into a new
Irish wilderness. It may not seem a good prospect to turn a forest of
exotic conifers into wildland, but what I saw there, and in the other
woodlands I walked, gives me confidence that a future natural wilderness
will work. It has lessons for our Public Forest Estate, as well as for the
whole of NW Europe. ADDENDUM - Mar 2013 Agreement has
been reached between Coillte and Ballycroy NP to collaborate on the
wilderness project. Bill Murphy and Denis Strong of the NP were
interviewed as part of a radio prgtam on RTE 1. A conference -
Wilderness in a Modified European Landscape - is to be held on 14th May –
16th May 2013 in Westport, Co Mayo. Programme details and how to register.

Much goes
on after I write about something, so that I often feel the need for an
update, whether as an Addendum or as a follow-up article. The formation of
the Scottish Wild Beavers Group (SWBG) over a year ago and their early
actions, and my follow-up research, gave me much to write about, but there
was little change that could be reported in the fate of the beavers when
SNH continued with its aim of searching for and trapping the free-living
beavers on the Tay. SNH and the Scottish Government obviously had an
embarrassment on their hands: they had gone ahead with an "official" trial
re-introduction of beaver in Knapdale, but with little real knowledge of
the extent of the Tay beavers, their success in breeding and establishing
themselves in the wild. They continued to maintain that there were only 20
beavers on the Tay, and must have thought that they could have scooped
them up quickly. They only trapped one beaver, and sadly Erica as she was
named by SWBG, died in captivity in Edinburgh zoo. SWBG had always known
there were more than 20 beavers, and so they used their local knowledge in
a survey that produced a much higher number of at least 80. SNH had to
concede this higher number when they worked with SWBG to confirm the
number of active lodges. This left the SNH's aim of a resumption of
trapping the beavers after the mating season in tatters. It all went
quiet, but it was known that SNH had submitted an
advisory paper to the Scottish Government on the “escaped/illegally
released beaver population in Strathtay”, and that a decision on their
fate was pending. It came in Mid-March this year - the beavers would get
to stay while the official trial played out. then a decision would be made
about the future re-introduction of beavers to Scotland as a whole. far
from taking the pressure off the Tay beavers, the decision led to a
clamour for their culling by farmers and landowners and with the collusion
of SNH. Are the beavers strictly protected under the EU habitats
Directive? Does the culling of beaver in Bavaria have any relevance to
Scotland?

The
noosphere describes the pervasive and ever-widening sphere of influence of
the human mind (noos is derived from the Greek for mind) so that
eventually all aspects of the biosphere will come under that influence, as
the last of many stages in its evolution. It is the sort of nightmare that
is consistent the constant shifting of goal posts that the conservation
industry performs to justify the deadhand control they have on nature. It
is the revisionism and sleight of hand that passes off that command and
control, almost always involving domestic livestock grazing, as being a
liberation of the landscape, giving it back to nature, and even rewilding.
Nature Development is a particular element of that expansion of the
noosphere, originating from the Netherlands, and which these distortions
of natural reality in Britain owe their allegiance to. It is the laziness
of small minds that does not see that the evidence from around the world
is totally unsupportive of this nonsense.

In losing wild land, we lost our wild
heritage and our freedoms, and we are still losing wildness today through
the continuing humanization of our land by the conservation industry and
their imposition of farming pressure. We survive in spite of that loss,
but we have lost the
wonder, the beauty and the spontaneity of wild nature.
Two contemporary writers are exploring that loss of wild heritage and are
to write books on rewilding. One of them, George Monbiot, understands the
drivers for that loss of wildness - the massive public funding from
farming and agri-environment subsidies that keep the conservation industry
in business, but come with preconditions that enforces that imposition of
farming. The funding takes away the ability of local people to
decide for themselves, and puts it in the hands of Natural England. It is
a loss of our freedoms, especially on publicly owned or accessible land.
Contemplation of natural scenes is important for human
well-being. Why can't we have natural spaces that are ours to freely
walk and where we can get away from farming?

A
stack of reports have come out recently on England's (the UKs) woodland.
What these reports wont tell you is how our woodland compares to the
forests of Europe. Two recent reports on the state of Europe's/World's
forests give us that comparison. The UK has one of the lowest forest covers in Europe; has
no primary, undisturbed forest area; has no strictly protected forest
area; has no protective forest that is designated; is amongst countries in Europe that have the lowest rate of
natural regeneration of forests and the lowest quantity of standing and
lying deadwood; has one of the highest proportions of plantation forestry
in Europe with the highest domination by non-native, introduced species;
is one of only a few countries that coppices woodland; and is in amongst
those countries in Europe with the lowest connectivity and highest
fragmentation of its forest cover. Given this background, it is
astonishing that the Progress Report from the Independent Panel on
Forestry has no evidence of this, but instead bangs on about every
woodland having to be managed.

I
came home by train via London about a month ago, and took the opportunity
to do some art galleries. The main attraction was the Forest, Rocks,
Torrents exhibition at the National Gallery. It achieved what I thought it
might in giving me a reference point for realism in landscape painting in
Norway and Switzerland. Wilderness in America is accused by William Cronon
of being an imported product of the European Romanticism of the Sublime in
landscape painting. I think he has it wrong. However, as with the little
known early history of protected areas in Europe, there is an unexplored
parallel in this artistic realism in Europe that gets away from the
aesthetic and on to the biophysical. The history of forests in Europe
shows that primary forest without human impact has only survived in
inaccessible and mountainous areas that are unsuitable for agricultural
use because of their difficult terrain and soil conditions. Painted today,
their scenic composition would owe nothing to a cultural movement such as
Romanticism, and everything to do with a wild state that even Cronon could
recognise as wilderness. ADDENDUM- Nov 2011 The
exploration of landscape in paintings and their emblematic use is proving
to be a rich vein of interest, which is also shared by others. A visit to
a brickworks near Sudbury helped explain to me what I had seen in a
painting of Cornard Wood by Gainsborough. Olli Ojala used paintings of his
native Finland wilderness to illustrate a talk at the European Wilderness
Days meeting in Estonia. I saw an old favourite by Gustave Courbet at the
Ashmolean, and next to it a delightful painting of stream running through
a wooded ravine, a view reminiscent of inaccessible ravine woodlands I've
walked. The Ashmolean also yielded a technically superb painting of the
Scottish Highlands on Skye - a literal transcription of the nature that was before the
painter, but while this painting has high realism, evidence in the scene
shows the landscape to be far from natural.

There
is a wilful ignorance in Britain about how out of step our national parks
are compared to the rest of Europe. What is never explained is that
British national parks are really just farmed landscapes protected only
from physical development, whereas many national parks in Europe prohibit
any form of exploitation either in the whole park, or in strictly
protected core areas of the park. Consequently, the range of top predators
that they are home to is testament to their wild characteristic. As we
know in Britain, the prevailing dogma is that we should admire the
landscapes under cultural exploitation, and there is a studied prejudice
from vested interest that resists seeing any retreat from that
exploitation. That prejudice also exists in continental Europe, but the strong message is that
those national parks that give a high priority to natural values
over cultural values achieve the greatest success for wildland. National
Parks should have different aims and aspirations than the dogma of
unremitting human exploitation. There is upheaval currently taking place
at Šumava National Park in
the Czech Republic because that prejudice is strong in the population
around the park, and the lessons haven't been learnt.

The
Natural Environment White Paper was as underwhelming as I suspected it
would be. However, George Monbiot thought otherwise in his article in the
Guardian, writing that it is a major advance in conservation policy. He thought that
the proposal for restoration areas, where ecological functions and
wildlife can be restored, looks like a step towards rewilding. The
examples given in the White paper don't support that. Monbiot pointed to
the Edwards report from 1991. It advocated setting up experimental schemes
in the National Parks, where farming is withdrawn entirely and the natural
succession of vegetation is allowed to take its course. It is unlikely
that Monbiot will get his wish that Government will state that some of
those restoration areas will be places in which farming and other forms of
commercial exploitation stop. The Edwards report was followed by the Wild
by Design in 1997 that looked in greater detail at ecological restoration
in national parks. It didn't take off then, and policy has since gone
backwards. Publicly owned land provides the best chance of ecological
restoration because the burden of exploitation can be removed. However,
that opportunity is increasingly being lost as responsibility for public
land is shrugged off into the hands of the conservation industry, such as
the 5,500ha of the Eastern Moors and Sheffield moors at the edge of the
Peak District.

I have saved
copies of
articles over the last two years that are about the boastful nonsense of the conservation
industry, mostly to do with the extent of their management intervention to
maintain secondary habitats. It stands at about 120 articles, and 100 of them
contain the word "rare". When I looked at which had "rare" and
"precious", it was always the ones about lowland heathland. This man-made
habitat is just not rare compared to some of the wild habitats I walk and that owe nothing to human intervention.
I describe some of them here, including upland ledges and gullies, and
coastal cliff shelfs. I would never
call them precious because that is a word that has also been devalued by
the conservation industry. To add to my despair, I still get enquiries
about whether anything can be done about the relentless juggernaut of heathland restoration
- this time it is Sutton Heath in Suffolk, and more on Hartlebury Common. ADDENDUM- June 2011 A petition site has been set up,
objecting to the destruction on Hartlebury Common. It has some telling
insights into what is happening on the common.

The
maritime cliffs of North Devon between Combe Martin and Lynton were an
unexpected delight. In spite of much of this coastal headland being
managed heath, there were inaccessible slopes and bays where the forces of
nature, the extremes of coastal exposure, were the only things that held
sway for the vegetation that clings on and which in many cases is scrub
woodland. These maritime cliffs and their immediate hinterland are
designated as SSSI for coastal heath thus throwing into sharp contrast the
unmanaged climactic communities of the steeper, inaccessible slopes, with
the managed, mostly tree-less (plagio-climactic) but more accessible
slopes of the heath. It set me the opportunity to test out whether a new
project that seeks to classify protected areas in IUCN Category I have any
chance of succeeding, given the vagaries of the protected area system we
have in the UK, and which has none of the rich language of the protected
area legislation across European counties, or their non-intervention
approach based on restriction of extractive activities.

Since
last October, when it first became clear that the Government was
considering selling off England's Public Forest Estate, there has been the
repulsive spectacle of a price being put on a fire sale of public assets,
the shifting sands as the Government sought to make the disposal more
palatable to a public bent on resisting the sell-off, and the exposure of
environmental organisations for being out of touch with public sentiment
perhaps because they were seeking to do deals behind closed doors. I did
not want to write about the Governments proposals, even now the
consultation on them was cancelled. Instead, I have drawn together many
good reasons why the forests should remain in public ownership in the PFE,
including two examples of local public support for FC
woodlands that predate those developments. The key issue now is the
uncertainty created by the setting up of the "independent" panel that will
advise Government on the future of public forestry in England. Will it
have the confidence of the public to do the right thing?

A
newspaper article at the end of November 2010 reported that SNH were to
trap beaver living free but "illegally" in Tayside. Occasionally, there had been reports
of beaver in Scotland other than those released in Knapdale, but I always
got the feeling that they were apocryphal. This article indicated
otherwise, and so I left a comment that questioned the legality of what
SNH was intending to do. A few days later, I got an email with information
about the meeting at which the "decision" had been made. I went off
walking for week shortly afterwards, and while in the National Trust-owned
Dove Dale NNR I noticed felled trees in the River Dove that seemed to be
about management for trout fishing. It reminded me of beaver dams in
America, and so I pondered - in the light of the Government trying to
offload NNR to NGOs
- whether the National Trust would ever consider reintroducing beaver to
"manage" the Dove. NNR should be where wild "nature comes first". When I
got back, I was contacted with information by Save the free beavers of the
Tay, a campaign to oppose the trapping. This article reviews the status of
the Tayside beavers both in the wild and in law.

The
conservation industry continues to base its justification of conservation
grazing on it being a natural process that maintained original natural
landscapes in a more open than closed condition. This is mostly predicated
on the Vera hypothesis, which is just a theory that has not
been supported by any of the many papers that have reviewed it, or brought
forward new data. And yet it has been seized upon by the conservation
industry as absolute evidence of open landscapes. More worryingly,
"naturalistic grazing" has been elevated to be the only driver in
restoring wild land, based on the Dutch experience of nature development,
and this is being heavily promoted across Europe to the unease of many who
feel it compromises wilderness principles because it lacks a systems
approach. It says nothing about the landscapes needed for wilderness
dependant species,
and it falsely elevates "agricultural biodiversity" over the ecological
functioning of three-dimensional structural
diversity
with its
decomposition processes and nutrient cycling. Recent evidence supports
that structural
diversity as being the original natural state, and the example of the
habitat needs of the barn owl confounds the addiction to grazing.

I was
shown around the rewilding South House Moor in the Ingleborough NNR by
Natural England staff, and given the background to the project. It became
clear that they had another non-intervention area on the NNR that had had
a longer period of exclusion of grazing. When I walked Scar Close, the
vibrancy and sheer delight of its restoring ecology spoke volumes for the
value and necessity of non-intervention sites in proving the case for
rewilding. It then become a mission to find and walk other examples, such
as the Axmouth to Lyme Regis Undercliff NNR, as well as some smaller
ancient woodland NNR sites that because of their location in awkward
limestone terrain have avoided extraction and management. These are wild
places, rich in natural processes, and surviving in spite of the
mainstream conservation dogma. They have similarities in their natural
value to the Lagodekhi State Nature Reserve, a strict reserve in Georgia
that I got to walk up near the border with Russia and Azerbaijan. This
non-intervention reserve has been protected since 1912. With the potential
hiving off of the NNRs in a cost costing measure, we will lose what
littler non-intervention area that we have.

I
make no apology for continuing a theme that exposes the conservation
industry in Britain to be a self-interested anachronism in its own
lifetime. People of greater vision have come before, such as Frank Fraser
Darling and Bruce Campbell, but it is frustrating that they have not been
heeded. Even when set against the practice of other countries - given a
contrast between Britain, Canada and America - they persist in burying
their heads in the sand. We don't have a view of a national system of
protected areas, let alone a national strategy for protected areas, left
as it is to the conservation industry. However, a recent process in France
where state and civil society joined together to discuss such things,
shows what can be achieved if the public have a stake, and not just the
conservation industry. Wales looks like it may be embarking on a similar
process in developing its Natural Environment Framework, even breaking out
of the dogma of the conservation industry of targets, species and
habitats, and considering instead whole ecosystems. Will it succeed? Or
will the dead hand of the conservation industry drag it down. Are our
children destined to only know wild nature as a field
full of sheep?

I
have to search out the wildness in landscapes. I find it in the wooded
narrow ravines in the limestone dales of Yorkshire where their
inaccessibility to livestock means they are refugia for woodland
wildflowers, as well as being vibrant water courses. I can also find
wildness in unmanaged woods, where in contrast it seems to to be killed by
the coppicing and ride clearance in managed woods. I used to find much
wildness walking the Pembrokeshire coast path, but the grazing and
mechanical clearance of gorse has become so ubiquitous that the wildness
seems to have been despoiled, covered in cow pats and horse droppings. Now
I have to be careful where I go to avoid this killing of wildness, and
replaced by the artificial. Some contemporary comment recognises that the
conservation industry are much to blame, but I was shocked to find an
article from 15 years ago that comprehensively demolished conservation
industry dogma. Bewilderingly, the portents in this article have gone
unheeded.

The
battle over conservation grazing throws up many irrational aspects of the
conservation industry, but the situation at Kingwood Common has to be the
one that transgresses all rationality, logic and common sense. At issue is
a 60ha common that has developed a pretty good woodland cover in the 40-50
years since grazing ceased, along with a ground flora of woodland
specialist plants that puts quite a few ancient woodlands to shame. It is
that rare example of a wildwood - every tree, shrub and plant chose where
it wanted to grow. Volunteer conservationists hacked out some rides 15
years ago and sowed heather. Now we get the conservation industry saying
this is remnant lowland heathland that has to be protected, and that a
large part of the woodland has to be fenced off so that cattle can be
pushed in to graze and maintain just the rides. Nonsense - but worse than
that as the cattle will destroy the woodland value. I walked the woods
with the Kingwood Common Preservation Group, formed to oppose the fencing
of the woods. The hope is that enough objections can be made by KCPG
members to the application to the Secretary of State to fence the commons
so that a public inquiry is held. Why did it have to get to this point?
Why weren't alternatives to grazing seriously considered? What happened to
the Ł95,000 that was granted to the Commons Conservators to develop a
management plan that local people could agree with? Wouldn't it have been
better used paying for what management may be needed for the rides? Why
does the conservation industry continue with a heathland approach to
Kingwood Common when it is obviously a woodland now?

The
relentless admiration for heathland amongst the conservation professionals
can wear you down, especially when every opportunity is taken to idolize
it. This became apparent again when the consultation responses on the
Public Forest Estate in England were published. The usual serial offenders
could be found in what has every sign of being a mass land grab of the PFE
for deforestation to open habitat. The 'scorched earth' approach to heath
management and the veneration of its supposed attributes is beginning to
be contested by those who have greater imagination in their management
approach, and by analyses on niche requirements of "heathland" species
that suggests that the conservation professionals have just got it wrong.
They have also got it wrong in understanding landscape perception and
preference, showing that the conservation
industry’s obsession with heathland is so out of step with ordinary
people.

The
historical driver for woodland clearance was the birth of agriculture.
However the contemporary driver is the targets for priority open habitat
restoration in the BAP. It is thus now the aspirations of the conservation
industry in their slavish adherence to the BAP, and in their pursuit of
the funding bonanza that they can pocket. Two examples of recent
felling applications illustrate this, and show why the Forestry Commission
has had to commit to developing a policy on deforestation, since they are
charged with preventing a net loss of woodland cover. The consultation on
the policy shows a sharp polarisation of views, which go the heart of what
is at stake in our landscapes. While conifer plantations are considered
fair game for deforestation by the conservation industry, the situation at
Gib Torr in Staffordshire shows that woodland wildlife is always at peril.

I
walked a fabulous ancient woodland in late summer, on the edge of a North
Yorkshire moor. I instinctively knew that this was something special since
it had all the elements that enthral me and which I associate with a
natural landscape. Moreover, it was what was missing that made it special,
as well as what was there. The woodlands are owned by the Woodland Trust,
and I was delighted to find that they too consider them to be special.
Contrary to much of the
current orthodoxy of woodland conservation, the Trust have committed to
management with a very light touch so that the natural feel of this
woodland, unparalleled in the area, is safeguarded. In the context of the
low woodland cover of the North Yorks Moors, this woodland and its future
has much to offer in learning the lessons of what a natural landscape is,
and how it can be expanded.

Staying with friends in Hampshire in June, I picked up the local paper and
found a fascinating article that juxtaposed the story of two adjacent
water meadows in the River Itchen valley near Winchester. The northern
water meadow was a "success story" for the county wildlife trust. They had
secured massive funding to re-impose an intensive management scheme on
their expanded nature reserve, cutting down hundreds of trees and bringing
in cattle grazing. By contrast, similar management proposals for
Winchester Meadows had begun to meet with strong opposition from local
people, who did not want to see a landscape that they valued returned to
an era when agriculture sucked the
vegetative life out of the landscape. My next visit in August coincided
with another article, indicating that Winchester College, the owners of
the contested meadows, had watered down the management proposals in the
face of a 220 signature petition. Why do these water meadows need such
destructive management? Because they are units of a SSSI, and have been
judged by one person to be in unfavourable condition. I give another
example in Hampshire where the decision of one person on the unfavourable
condition of the River Avon SSSI has led to management that is damaging
the ecology of the river. This is the way that "nature conservation" is
regulated and carried out, but local people are increasingly pointing out
how wrong it is. ADDENDUM
-Oct 2011: The decision to cease vegetation clearance on the River
Avon still doesn't resolve the reasons why such a high-handed approach was
taken to river management. While it has for the most part stopped on the
Avon, it is still happening on other rivers where the aquatic vegetation
is an important part of the river ecosystem. Is it for "nature
conservation” or for “fishery purposes”?

There is an
inherent and determined bias in commentary on landscapes in Britain, and
particularly on the potential effects of rewilding. What is particularly
unsettling is that while this may be expected from land use interests, and
especially the conservation industry, you would not expect that
academic research would propagate that same bias and subjectivity. Popular
coverage of science reports tends to embroider, but it should not be the
case that researchers step outside of their research findings to confirm
popular prejudice or, even worse, pursue that bias in their work. There is an obvious void in the evidence base on wildland
and rewilding in Britain, and in informed and uninhibited discussion.
Consequently policy formulation is lacking that could give leadership.
What is needed is the hard evidence that comes from objective research,
and it will
need a positive and willing outlook that does not pander to the sceptics,
but looks past current barriers and brings forward novel observations and
solutions. To fill that void, a Wildland Research Institute is to be
launched later this year in Leeds University. It will ask
questions about the requirements, strategies and policies needed for a
transition to a greater presence of wild landscapes and natural processes
in the UK.

I went on a training
course on Forest Habitat Networks in March. It was a fun four days, mixing
presentations with landscape exercises and field trips out. It was while
out on the field trips that a fundamental message came across about the
nature of landscapes and the network linkages we were seeking to create.
At our first stop, the treeless wet desert of a sheep fell was the hostile
matrix through which we hoped to reduce resistance and increase
permeability to wildlife. The matrix through which our linkages of new
woody plantings would connect was thus a predominantly open landscape. At
our second stop, the matrix was inverted as it was a predominantly closed
landscape with high woodland cover and our linkages would be new field
margins of unimproved grassland alongside a river. Some believe that in a
wild Britain the matrix would be closed, and thus finding areas with high
woodland cover in Britain offer the greatest potential for rewilding. But
this not the view of the conservation industry that clings to notions that
Britain was always an open landscape, maintained that way by wild
herbivores, and that their use of domestic livestock just mimics that wild
situation. However, the evidence is just not there to support this. The
concentration of domestic livestock is so much higher today than would
have been its wild equivalent, and it is a
measure of how enormously we have changed the ecology of Britain.

The logical step after
writing about tree felling to restore open habitat is to write about
conservation grazing with farm animals, as that is inevitably applied
after the trees have gone over. But grazing happens everywhere in nature
conservation, as it is the orthodox dogma for maintaining biodiversity.
And yet, what is the justification for conservation grazing, and does it
produce what the experts claim? It is increasingly prescribed as
management for woodland, but this rails against rationality when simple
observation can show how damaging grazing is to woodland wildlife. It
really does question whether the nature conservation industry ever takes
notice of the evidence in front of their eyes, rather than be slavish to a
dogma that is appearing more and more to be myth. A couple of days on a
field trip to the Ennerdale valley in the Lake District provides much to
consider.

The felling of trees that
often accompanies heathland restoration is the most obvious sign of
destruction that infuriates people, but there is a less obvious
destruction going on in the damage to reptile habitat. I picked up on this
from an e-forum for herpetologists, who uniformly claimed that heathland
management was extinguishing reptile populations through the unthinking
destruction of their sites of hibernation. In a simple but powerful
explanation using photographs of what the conservation industry would
regard as an overgrown heath, one contributor showed the importance of the
natural mulch layer that accumulates under gorse and copses of birch, so
that these were thus essential elements of the heathland mosaic. And yet
they and the mulch layers were destroyed when heathland is cleared
through. Heathland is not the only open habitat restored by clearing trees
and scrub, and where there is protest at the destruction. Chalkland is
another, and I came across a recent example of protests against the
removal of trees around the edge of a lowland bog. Local people fear the
loss of existing wildlife associated with the trees for little gain over
the existing bog area. Restoring open habitats has created grief ever
since targets were set in the UK BAP over 10 years ago. Paradoxically, it
is only now that a policy is emerging that aims to make sensible decisions
about whether restoration of open habitats by felling should be allowed.

Watching free-living
native animals in natural settings brings a place to life and creates an
atmosphere of wildness. I get this from watching roe deer in my local
ancient woodland, and as they have spread onto the moor. I also see them
in the woodland of the Craven area, where I watch as this woodland habitat
moves out in small areas of the limestone pavement and is joined by the
roe deer too. This limestone landscape was once home to many animals now
lost, such as wolf, brown bear and wildcat. It was also home to lynx, a
woodland cat whose main quarry were the roe deer that I see today. The
latest radiocarbon dating shows the lynx to have existed in the Craven
area well after the woodland is thought to have been cleared, but how did
they cling on there? What would be needed for their reintroduction?

So much of our nature
conservation is a trade-off in choices, and the lucky ones are those who
get to choose. This is especially so of our uplands, held to ransom by
vested interest whether it be farming, game shooting, or the birdists who
rule most of the biodiversity conservation orthodoxy. Wildland and
rewilding rarely get a look in as it is threatening to all those vested
interests. The current consultation over the clear felling of
Threestoneburn Forest in the Northumberland National Park shows all the
usual drivers at work. At stake is the loss of a scarce red squirrel
population if the license is approved, and the "gain" is just a larger
area of grouse moor in which the usual predator control by gamekeepers
will wreak wholesale slaughter. It didn't have to be this way - the
Forestry Commission should not have sold this publicly owned land of the
Forest, which could have instead become a new wildwood in the uplands. But
then the Northumberland National Park Authority had other ideas.

I checked out two
rewilding projects based on tree planting to restore the natural woodland
coverage. One of them, in the Yorkshire Dales, has been carried out by
Natural England, but without much fanfare, nor seemingly any context. The
same could be said of the native woodland creations on Forestry Commission
land in the Lake District. By comparison, the Carrifran Wildwood is a
large scale community initiative, well documented and an inspiration to
all of us, and it fulfils on the overwhelming public wish for more
woodland. Where is the strategic direction for woodland creation in
Britain? Certainly there is none in England and Wales. Many reports stress
the need for new woodland of critically large size to ensure the full
return of ecological function. However, where you might think that
Government would provide a lead on this, it is in fact two private
landowners who have committed their resources to developing two of the
largest native woodlands in Britain.

Its
always difficult when I come home from walking wildland in other
countries. There is the inevitable slump during which I try to recapture
my enthusiasm amongst British landscapes, seeking out those little areas
of wildness that give me hope. I know that many object to my comparisons,
but how will we learn about wildland if we don't see the lessons from
other countries where they have a greater claim to its existence? A
significant aspect this time of my weeks spent in America, was learning
more about the Native American culture and its relationship to the land,
and seeing for myself the plants in abundance in wildland that native
peoples relied on. This ethnobotanical heritage is much studied now, and
Permaculturists in America are keen to learn the lessons of how native
landscapes can be sustaining. Wild food foraging in Britain is a legacy
that just about connects us with our aboriginal ancestors, but our
landscapes heavily impoverished by agriculture leave us no great extent
for this. Is there a way to reconnect with our ethnobotanical heritage in
Britain? Can the forest gardens of British Permaculturists be scaled up
and sit well within an extended wild and native landscape?

Each time I go to
America, I try to walk as much designated wilderness as I can. You can't
drive straight up to the boundary of wilderness, it is buffered by other
wildlands that you have to walk across first. That's no bad thing as it
gives physical protection as well as setting you up for the journey you
will have once you are on a wilderness trail. It has given you time to
settle in to the landscape, so that you can enjoy the physical intimacy
and breathtaking beauty that is coming your way - the wilderness
experience. I walked 10 wildernesses this summer. Each was different in
its own way, but all shared the same value - that nature was in charge.
The landscapes rich in wildlife and scenic beauty were untrammelled by
agriculture. The American system of publicly owned and managed wildland is
oft-times called Americas Best Idea. I couldn't agree more, and so it is
always hard to come back to Britain to see how poorly wild land is
regarded here. I think it is because of a cultural conditioning from
millennia of blanding out our landscapes by farming. We need to have the
shared aspirations of public ownership and stewardship of wildland that
America has.

Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming is set within a much larger,
surrounding ecosystem of national forests and national wildlife areas. The
landscape was not what I expected, but then I'm not sure what I did
expect. What it turned out to be was everything on a large scale. Thus the
forested areas where immense, even despite the devastating fires of 1988
that destroyed a third of the woodland in the Park, but set it on its way
to new growth and regeneration. Yellowstone Lake was vast and the
Yellowstone and Snake Rivers impressive. Huge too were the open meadow
areas in the Hayden and Lamar Valleys. The mountains were big - and
covered with snow. And the wildlife population was immense, with great
herds of buffalo and elk, numerous pronghorn antelopes and mule deer, and
the chance to see grizzlies and black bear. But it was the wolves,
restored to Yellowstone just over a decade ago that gave it a sense of
completeness, and a thrill beside. One element was msising though, the
people who had had a 10,000 year relationship with the area, and really
were part of the natural landscape.

I
came across a discussion from last year about the place of geomancy in
Permaculture. The discussion ranged on to the scientific method, with some
advocating that as the basis for Permaculture. As an ex-scientist, I would
back a scientific approach in Permaculture, but not necessarily the rigors
of the scientific method, which I think is different. What do other
supposedly rational movements believe, such as organic farming? Do they
take an evidence-based approach, or is their philosophy a compromise with
commercial expedience? Do conservation professionals ever consider the
unintended consequences of their action? What approach tells you what is
rational and what is expedient?

EU
directives on reintroducing species extinct in Britain impose a legal
obligation on us, but also a moral obligation because their extinction was
our doing.
Our Governments have shown little serious intention to abide by this
obligation, and so it is left to private landowners, such as Paul Lister
at Alladale in the Highlands to reintroduce these species in a rewilding
of his entire Glen. Lister is coming up against a series of restrictions
that frustrate him at every turn. We just don't have a legal structure
that allows real ecological restoration. However, there is an example of
Pleistocene rewilding in Siberia that shows promise, and Pleistocene
rewilding has been considered in a serious, deliberative process for N
America. We don't have those type of discussions, and we should, like the
Duck Test at a meeting of the Society of Ecological Restoration in
Michigan. The British way of grazing landscapes with livestock is frowned
at by the SER, and so it should be here. There is a real example in Devon
of rewilding that relied on wild browsers rather than grazing, but it
could be criticised as a one off and which does not exemplify a fully
restored system with predator/prey interactions. A remarkable 30 year-old
paper explores this for two contrasting locations. It needs to be updated
and used as the basis for serious discussion of rewilding. The recent
consent given to trial release of beaver in Scotland is but one small
step.

As I
was putting together information for an article on marine protection,
Government published a Draft Marine Bill on the 3 April as part of its
legislative process in this Parliamentary session. The Bill is open to
consultation until 26 June. Before responding to that, this article sets
out why current marine protection is inadequate, and confronts the
misguided understanding of the fishing industry of their relationship with
the sea and their opposition to marine protection. By looking at various
examples of locations where current activities are damaging to the marine
environment, such as dredging for gravel, scallop dredging and bottom
trawling, it is clear what measures for protection should be afforded by
the Bill.

I did
not plan a third article in this series of consecutive articles, but then
I did predict at the end of the second article the inevitability of more
examples popping up of dismay at industrial nature conservation on
heathland, and that it would have been caused by the pressures arising
from the priorities in the UKBAP. Thus a week after I posted the article
on Swineholes Wood, my attention was drawn to a letter in the Sheffield
Telegraph despairing at the planned destruction of so many trees on a
Local Nature Reserve (LNR) on the outskirts of Sheffield. The letter was
from a Friends group who had come together to question the basis of the
management. It soon became clear to me that they had every reason to do so
since the management plan was perfunctory, misleading, and lacked
credibility because it did not identify an important habitat feature of
this LNR. As the number of such examples stack up, it begs the question
why local people get so little say compared to the conservation
professionals, and why there isn't more assessment of the damaging impact
of conservation work before it is carried out. ADDENDUM - Nomansland
Common - Oaks being felled to make way for grass and heather, 17 March
2008. It took only a few hours to find out what was going on after a
letter appeared over the weekend, contesting the tree felling on common
lands in Hertfordshire. Just another example of a local person incensed at
the high-handed management by conservations professionals, and because of
the target driven heathland restoration of the local Biodiversity Action
plan.

This
is a companion piece that follows on from the previous article. It started out as an Addendum to that article but quickly
grew to become a follow-up. As is often the case, it
was a newspaper report that popped up soon after, of more local people
protesting at the chopping down of trees on a well-loved open air space.
This time it is in Staffordshire, at Swineholes Wood, a reserve managed by
Staffordshire Wildlife Trust. To no
surprise it fits with the common pattern - the designation of Swinehole Woods as a heathland Site of Special Scientific Interest
(SSSI) is enforcing a high-handed, MacDonaldised view of nature
conservation onto the landscape that seems to deny that there is
woodlands there at all. What is happening there - the anger amongst local
people that they weren't consulted before the work was carried out -
pretty much happens everywhere. This is in spite of the fact that Natural
England have sponsored guidance and commissioned a report, both of which
encourage an approach to agreeing management that includes local people.

I am
always thrilled to see a plant in the wild that I grow in my garden. Of
course, it works the other way around as well, buying plants for the
garden that we have seen in the wild here, or on our various trips abroad.
This article is a story about three woodland wildflowers that we grow in
our garden. All three turn out to be native widlflowers in Britain, but we
have only seen one in the wild here, the other two are so rare that there
are only a few locations in Britain where they can be found growing. One
of the rarities used to grow in woodland on light acid soils, and so it is
unsurprising that it is rare since these are the woodlands that were
easily lost to heathland, and remain lost because of the craze amongst
conservation professionals for heath. There are no national plans to
conserve or reintroduce this woodland plant. Why should conservation
professionals get their choices and have such a large say in how our
landscapes are managed, especially on publicly owned land? Examples from
Ashdown Forest and Blacka Moor show how local people continue their dogged
opposition.

I was
challenged recently over why I consider human interference with the landscape so
much more unnatural than animal
interference,
suggesting that since we are animals as well, then there was nothing
unnatural about our actions. There are a number of ways I could have to
answered this, but in the end the best way - and the one I followed here -
was to examine what are the non-human (natural?) forces and then decide
whether human disturbance (mangement, dominant use etc.) has any
commonality. This is important not just in our approach to nature
conservation, but more fundamentally in how we farm these natural
resources for our own use. Permaculture, in seeking to emulate natural
processes in the cultivated ecology of its approach to sustain living, has
much to offer as a recent article on the future of farming in Britain has
indicated. Permaculture can bring about a reinstalling of wild and natural
processes as a force in our landscapes.

If you don't believe that
the natural state of the UK is to be predominantly covered with grassland,
then it begs the question of where is the natural grassland in the UK, and
was this where the grassland wildflowers originally came from when they
marched out to colonise land stripped of trees by agriculture? The
prairies and plains of N. America provide a useful example in
understanding what are the natural forces and conditions that favour
grassland over trees, before seeking out where the natural forces and
conditions may exist in the UK. Contemporary nature conservation cuts
across these natural forces and maintains artificial grasslands. The
chalklands of Harting Down are a classic example, but local people object
to the heavy handed management that is being used to maintain the
calcareous grassland there, especially since this management is destroying
the wildland character that they have begun to appreciate. A paper from
1976 confirms the artificiality of these calcareous grasslands, and
indicates that the trees and shrubs have a greater claim to a natural
presence on Harting Down than the chalkland wildflowers. Will conservation
professionals admit to this, and become much smarter in considering whole
landscapes with mixed habitats rather than concentrating on species?

I read about Cormac
Cullinan and his book Wild Law, late last year. It inspired me, and so I
jumped at the chance to hear him talk in Leeds. I knew that I wanted to
write about his ideas, and I was keen to ask him what legislation he would
enact to give wild nature the rights in law that it lacks, especially
since UK legislation for species protection is poor and often flouted. At
first, he surprised me by sidestepping the question, but his key message
is that legislation alone is insufficient - it has to be a bottom-up
approach that brings about a radical change in human behaviour and which
seeks reconciliation between humans and the natural world.

Repairing a timber frame
house opened up a window into the history of the uses
that we made of the natural world. Perhaps unwittingly then, the landscape
management for those products also brought with it new communities of
wildlife. With the decline of that management through lack of demand for
the product, so too have of those communities of wildlife declined. In
their place, however, has come wild nature, ever present to reclaim what
we have lost interest in. Is it right, now, to rewind the landscape clock
just for the sake of those artificial communities of wildlife, when we
inevitably waste the products of the management and destroy the returning
wild nature?

A conference was held in
Cambridge that explored
passionate responses to nature,
and asked the central question -can nature help
us think? Three of
the speakers had books that had come out or were coming out this year on
wildness, and one of the speakers was also linked to a fourth author who
also had a book out on wildness. As I see patterns of association in wild
nature, so also has it always fascinated me to see the patterns of
association between people and the influence they may seek to exert. So
what of these books on wildness? And what would be my take on the quality
of experience of wildness in Britain?

I got a mild rebuke from Norma in London
that I only wrote about wild nature in rural areas, and said little about
urban ecology. True enough, but then town planning from the 1930s onwards
pretty much created the division by regarding the urban as completely
artificial, unleavened by any opportunity for wild nature except in
neglected or derelict patches. That is changing as society recognises the
health and pyscological benefits of contact with the natural world,
especially the natrural or wild play of children. People
now defend their green spaces and there is the potential for more arising
from the new planning agenda of green infrastructure. What is interesting
is that there are a number of standards around that set a spatial value
for the provision of publicly available access to greenspace in towns and
cities. We should make ourselves familiar with these, and use them to
bargain for the greenspace that we undoubtedly need close to our doorstep.
ADDENDUM - NeighbourWoods - Good practice in urban woodland planning and design,
and Urban Woodland Management Guides – Woodland Trust, 28 October
2007. Links to two
resources that exist to support the creation and management of of urban
woodland. ADDENDUM - Children’s play in natural
environments, 19 November 2007 Link to an excellent factsheet on wild
play.

The Government has been
building towards a Marine Bill, commissioning background studies and consulting at each
stage of its development. I picked up on this process late on, the White
Paper to which this consultation response is directed being the point at
which I came in. Thus it is a disappointment to me that the poor content
of the Marine Bill in relation to marine protection was almost inevitable,
given the tenor of the responses to an earlier consultation. Even the
Wildlife and Countryside Link response in that earlier consultation, in
some areas, fell into line with the overwhelming protection of business
interests where they may be jeopardised by new marine conservation
designations. How do you now backtrack? What would convince Government
when they can turn to the evidence from the previous consultation to say
that the bill meets the aspirations of the stakeholder response that they
received? ADDENDUM - West Wales Marine Conservation, 28 June
Blaise Bullimore of the Pembrokeshire local
group of the Marine Conservation Society, who organised the petition for
the HPMR at the Skomer MNR office at St Martins Haven. contacted me with
information about the website of West Wales Marine Conservation. ADDENDUM
- South-east Commonwealth Marine Reserve Network, Australia, 23 July Maddeningly, the Marine Bill that many had called for
was omitted from the next Parliamentary legislative session. What made it
even worse was that it was preceded only days before by the announcement of
an excellent example of a new marine reserve network for SE Australia.

There is still too much
compromise between nature conservation, commercial land use and
conservation land management, leading often to the observation that
wildness is being killed off by the conservation professionals. Sometimes
this is hypocrisy - the National Trust for Scotland using public funding
for grouse shooting on their Mar Lodge estate when they boast about their
conservation efforts for black grouse and capercaillie. Or the National
Trust in England relocating feral goats onto one of their conservation
heathland sites in Dorset, only to have to cull them when they escaped.
This grooming of nature and the killing of wildness reaches a frenzy in
heathland restoration, driven by targets in the UK Biodiversity Action
Plan (BAP) as I explain here. But nature grooming goes on everywhere in
nature conservation, and it is a wonder that native species ever existed
in wild nature before we
came along to kill off all the wildness. ADDENDUM - Ashdown
Forest, 14 May Within weeks of writing the article, another example of
the tensions that exist between local people and conservation projects
came to light, and gave further evidence of the consistency of the drivers
that create that tension. ADDENDUM - Ashdown Forest Action Group, 23
July Peter Crane of the Action Group got in touch with me and
explained their oppositon to further enclose and grazing of the forest.

Studies show that when
given thechoice, there are things that we like in a landscape
such as topoghraphy, water, scale and extent of view, but our biggest
preference is for naturalness. We distinguish naturalness on the basis of
a lack of man-made artefacts, but also on the state of the landscape
vegetation and whether it has been altered by human management. The more
we tutor our preference, the more we are likely to be discriminating over
the state of naturalness, and thus disenchantment will result if we see
the effects of management - we may be put off and decide not to visit that
landcape again. This is happening when nature conservation through
fencing and grazing animals is enforced on landscapes where local people
have long enjoyed open access, and enjoyed the transfroming wildness that
will be lost through this management. At fault is the imposition of a
landscape designation - SSSI - the intention of which is to hold the land
in stasis so that it delivers on an impossibly tight list of
characteristics that will be in direct conflict with wild nature. This is
an update on the article about Blacka Moor from Dec, 2005.

Books about British
woodland can leave you more confused than informed. It is hard to be too
categorical about how natural our woodland is today when it has been
modified so much over the millennia. Sometimes, you can pick out clear
patterns in nature, but watching a woodland regenerate is another way in.
The Duddon valley is packed with ancient woodland, and there is a conifer
plantation in the process of being felled that when it regenerates into
native broad-leaved woodland will complete a band of woodland that will
stretch the whole length of the valley. Its an irresistible opportunity to
study woodland into the future.

I was astonished to read
in an almost throwaway remark in an article that the RSPB shot foxes in
one of their reserves in Scotland. It seemed such a contradictory act from
an organisation dedicated to wildlife conservation. It bit harder when
RSPB Scotland put out a press release shortly after I read that,
condemning the poisoning of red kites from bait put out on game shooting
estates. This seemed like hypocrisy, especially when it became clear that
the RSPB allowed game shooting on the same reserve in which they shot
foxes, and that many wildfowlers get to shoot over RSPB reserves all over
the place. At the centre of this story is the capercaillie, a game bird
once driven to extinction, re-introduced, and now seriously in decline
again. Who gets to choose which animal lives and which animal dies?

The appreciation of
wildland may be on the increase, but it still lacks a basic understanding
and it has yet to reach out to the general population. Unsurprisingly, I
have a pretty poor opinion of most British landscapes and thus their
ability to inspire us, or teach us much about wild nature. A workshop in
Glen Coe in November on sharing wilderness experience epitomised for me
the games of delusion we play. Not so for High School students in
California where a 12th grade course on ECOLITERACY requires them to spend
at least five days backpacking in a wilderness. As I explain, these
students don't have far to travel to get their wilderness experience. And
nor do I, now I have settled on what I have found has significant wildland
value to me.

I've been collecting
varied data sets on woodland in Britain for some time now, as well as I
have been searching out some of the best woodland to go walking in.
Figures tumble out but they don't always tell you the story that walking
the woodland can. We do have some remarkable woodland nature, but we have
no way of classifying how much, nor do we have a systematic and effective
approach to protecting it. The problem is that we have a tradition of
managing woodland, even in protected areas where supposedly
"wildlife comes first". We also have one of the lowest woodland
coverages in Europe and consume five times more woodland than we produce.
Thus woodland is doubly a poor relation in Britain, and we need some
inspirational ideas and leadership.

I read a Defra press
release in August that mentioned a No Take Zone (NTZ) in the marine nature
reserve around Lundy Island. It didn't register with me at the time, but I
later saw a TV news piece showing underwater filming of the fabulous
marine ecology in the waters off Lundy Island. It dawned on me that here
was a maritime rewilding going on. As I found out more, it also became
apparent that this NTZ was the first statutory measure in Britain to
strictly limit the extractive activity of people in a protected area.
Moreover, it was also probably the first example of the use in Britain of
a zoning approach to a protected area. The Lundy NTZ sets a principled
example that we should extend to terrestrial protected areas.

There were some real wild
nature thrills on a late season trip to the Pembrokeshire Coast - a
dancing dolphin, a ray breaking the surface, and lots of grey seals and
their pups on the rocky shores. The seals attract locals and tourists who
delight in seeing new life being born to these cute and amusing mammals.
The survival rate for the pupping is high here, probably because the
Pembrokeshire Coast is admired and respected for its excellent coastal and
marine natural heritage, which has some measure of protection albeit
mostly voluntary. I returned home to reports of pregnant grey seals being
shot dead in the Western Isles, and calls for seals to be given greater
legal protection. We should also consider giving real legal protection
within the various layers of designation that cover such as the
Pembrokeshire Coast.

Why are there forests
marked on maps of Britain that have no trees? Certainly, most of Britain
was re-covered in trees after the last ice age, but agriculture in the
main, and perhaps climatic conditions in some uplands, led to a loss of
almost all that woodland. Is it some racial memory that keeps those
forests alive, or does a forest not always imply an area of woodland?

You can see some odd
things going in our national nature reserves, many of which are treated
like suburban gardens. Is this helpful hand approach an acceptable
influence of humans, or should we stand back, accept that it is not ours
to make all the choices of what survives and what goes, and instead allow
Mother Nature to get on with it?

Defra initiated a
consultation on reviewing the Forestry Strategy for England. A good range
of documents were given as background for the consultation, and the
question format of the consultation itself adequately reflected the
contemporary and future issues for forestry. Here is my response to that
consultation, and which contains a recommendation for creating new, large
scale wildwoods.

We have a stultifying low
ambition for protected landscapes in the UK, and the European Landscape
Convention that Government recently signed will do nothing to raise the
level of that ambition, fixated on cultural landscapes as the Convention
is. An advocate for the Convention imputes some advantage of protected
cultural landscapes in complementing more strictly protected landscapes,
except that we don't have any strictly protected landscapes to speak of
and the logic seems faulty. What are our more strictly protected
landscapes, and can we do better?

When urban dwellers are
under pressure to reduce their ecological footprint, it comes hard that
they get little say in what happens to the open countryside around them.
Denied its use, there are occasional gains in access rights, but no real
say in the money poured in to rural areas. One such trend is the public
money being used by conservation charities to buy up farmland. Should
those charities be able to manage the land only in the narrow interests of
their members, or should they take greater account of wider public views?

Raising the water level
in soil is a great selective pressure and driving force for the return of
wetland vegetation. Hence many new nature reserves are currently based
around wetland restoration. I had the opportunity to see this first hand
during recent field visits in Wales. The response of the landscape to
rising water content, and our methods of managing it, offers a window of
thought into the current issues about wildland restoration, as does the
example of Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska where the glacial retreat
of the last 250 years has seen the return of a range of habitat mosaics. The return of
wild nature to restored wetland may be the nearest contemporary equivalent we have to
watching vegetation returning after our last Ice Age.

There are some beautiful
examples of wild nature if you look carefully in the British landscape.
Sometimes just small, as in a fragment of ancient woodland or a little
undisturbed wetland. Our coastal cliffs also offer some spectacular
wildflowers. Few of these are represented by our protected areas which, in
the main, have other characteristics associated with their management.
Looking for wildland will help us make the distinction and can lead on to
the development of a value system for wild nature.

It was to be expected
that an easy accusation levelled against wildland enthusiasts would be
excluding people from the countryside in a new Highland Clearance. Partly
this is due to the laziness of accusers in understanding wilding, but it
is just as likely to be a simple tactic to raise anxiety amongst land
interests to prevent change. The next year will see more literature
articulating wildland philosophy and the place of humans in nature. As is
so often the case, the recent history of North America, and particularly
it's Native American population, offers lessons that bridge the much
longer timescale of landscape change that we have had in Britain. We need
a new approach to humans in nature, and there are proposals that help us
on the way.

In my landscaping work, I
love it when the groundwork is done and the planting begins: its when the
design really gets to be a reality and plants are my thing. Some of the
fun is taken out when the ground I am working with is full of the garbage
of years of dumping and covering up, whether it is agricultural waste or
the detritus of people and their broken buildings. My current project has
this blight. What started out as plan to restore the natural plant
diversity of the site has turned into a reclamation of the land and then a
restoration of its ecological processes. It is restoration ecology and
puts the work in amongst a growing international movement who seek the
ecological restoration of our damaged and degraded landscapes.

Sometimes the evidence
stacks up to the point where diplomacy goes out the window and you have to
be honest. The biggest problem facing publicly owned land near towns and
cities is not the threat of urban expansion, its the land management
techniques of the conservation professionals. The issue comes down to
access and unhindered public use when the conservation plan demands
fencing off and being run with livestock. The ultimate blame lays with
English Nature who perversely have established - through their protected
area designations - a "farmed" landscape as the universal method for
nature conservation. Thus the general public - who are beginning to value
the wildness and unmanaged nature of ungrazed public land - are losing out
to the industrialisation of nature conservation. Three recent examples
illustrate this, but the public are fighting back. ADDENDUMNovember 2006 - Its happened again, so another example
St Catherines Hill is added.

A draft vision statement for the Natural
Environment was posted for comment on the DEFRA website in mid-October,
with a closing date of 18th November. While the limited window of
opportunity for comment was a disappointment, far worse was the
realisation that wild nature didn't get much of a look-in. The draft is
essentially a vision for the human species use of natural resources -
resourcism as it is called in America. We are dependent on the natural
world for our survival, but that does not mean that the natural world is
here solely for the use of the human species. Along with many other
respondents, I made that point in my comment, but also went on to make the
case for core areas of wildland in which the future of our wild nature is
safeguarded.

A walking holiday in a New Hampshire forest turned out to
be a more profound experience than just the immense joy of seeing the
autumnal colours. The White Mountain National Forest has some core
wilderness areas and when we hiked into one of them - the Sandwich Ridge
Wilderness - we were impressed with how little difference there was
between the woodland either side of the wilderness boundary. We learnt
much about the forest management practice as we walked the National Forest
and it is clear that natural systems are as important in the managed areas
of the National Forest as they are in the non-managed wilderness areas.
The wilderness areas, the management of the woodland, and the clearings in
the forest, provide a remarkable example in practice of the different intensities or zones of land use
that characterize Permaculture Design.

The bad news at the beginning of September that the
application for a trial to reintroduce beaver to Scotland had been turned
down again has upset a lot of wildland enthusiasts. It perhaps shouldn't
come as a surprise as it is still a tough time out there for wild animals,
with not much reason to hope for any change. I last wrote about the
difficulties facing wild animals in Feb 2004. Here are some of the things
that have happened since then.

The new Government policy for England's ancient and native
woodland could be interpreted as establishing a National Wildland System
for England. The policy makes a commitment to maintain and extend the
coverage of ancient and native woodland in England, and it does so by
taking a whole landscape approach. By reconnecting ancient woodland and
other semi-natural habitats, the policy aims to recreate ecologically
functional landscapes. The significance of this policy lies in the fact
that a large proportion of the ancient and native woodland resource is
publicly owned, and is managed by the Forestry Commission, a Government
agency. In this, there is a parallel with the Government agencies in
America that manage federally-owned land and which have a role in their
National Wilderness Preservation System.

I believe that arguments over whether the concepts of
wilderness, as exemplified in North America, are based on a falsity are
missing the point. There was a mistaken assumption by early settlers, and
then later chroniclers, that what they were seeing were landscapes
untouched by humans, when we now recognise evidence of extensive use by
native populations. But the key issue is the lessons
we should learn from the patterns and relative
intensity of land use that was represented by the native American way of
life, and contrasting it with the dominating approach of European human
land use that would have been imported with those
settlers.

In the temperate climate and soils of
Britain, woodland represents the predominant climax ecology of our
landscapes if they are allowed to rewild.
Trees in the landscape are not just about re-creation of wildland though -
they have many other productive purposes that served us as the woodland
people we used to be many thousands of years ago. Permaculturists have the
instinctive feel of a woodland people as their zonal approach
to land use leads them to encourage ecological succession whereby significant elements of wildland
are regenerated and maintained as a part of a continuum of land use. The Permaculture
Association are to mark the importance of trees in the landscape by co-ordinating
a series of educational, link-building and working activities for 2006 in
the program of events for its Year of the Tree.

Enthusiasm
is growing amongst the
statutory conservation agencies, and in many voluntary organisations, to
adopt a whole landscape
approach to nature conservation. Britain
will become wilder, and there will be a return of wild animals in greater
numbers as they take advantage of this new habitat range.
Problems will occur when this wild nature butts up against the interests
of people. Other issues on the road to more wild land will be the emotive
case of windfarms, the need for us as a society to develop a respectful
use of this new wildland, and the false hope that the new subsidy regime
will allow farming to deliver on this rewilding.

Walks in old woodland can be very rewarding,
with their abundant groundcover of flowering plants and the many birds and
mammals that have made them their home. Old woodlands exist everywhere in
Britain, whether on limestone or sandstone, in the uplands and
semi-uplands, on wetlands, or on the sandy gravel of lowlands. These small
outposts of nature's abundance are the inspiration for many rewooding
projects throughout Britain, bringing wild nature back to our landscapes.

Crofting in Scotland seems always to evoke strong
emotions, probably because it is a form of land tenure born out of a
mistrust of the landowner. An action in the Scottish Land Court recently
reinforced that stereotype when the headlines of press reports praised the
defiance of a crofter in his defeat of the wealthy landowner. However, the
real story has nothing to do with these stereotypes, and has everything to
do with the future of Scotland's landscapes.

A new year gets me reviewing what progress
there has been on promoting a value for wild land. Good debate has gone
on, but it is lost to the general public as it is confined to subscription
journals that do not publish on the internet. Key issues have arisen: wild
landscapes are dynamic, shaped by wild animals as well as the climate and
habitat; historical loss of woodland cover in Britain could have been
natural in some areas, rather than from clearing by early farmers; and
current conservation legislation in Britain needs revising if it is not to
hold back more natural approaches to nature conservation. An alarming issue
for me is the anthropocentric conceptualisation of wilderness in Britain -
mindscapes instead of wildscapes because there is no wilderness in Britain
to learn from.

Its been an interesting year for discussion
within the Permacultural community about its approach to woodland. A
successful first woodland gathering was held, which was followed-up by a
workshop at the annual convergence. In the background to this was a
consultation from the organic movement on its standards for woodland. In
helpful spirit, the consultation was circulated amongst the Permaculture
community, but few could offer much useful comment when the philosophy
behind the standards seemed to offer little empathy with what Permaculturists set out to do. Permaculturists start from a different
point and, over this next year, the initial markers set out in this
article will contribute to the Permacultural community developing their
own approach to woodland.

The choice of NW Slovenia for a walking
holiday was luckier than we could ever have hoped for. Guide books showed
beautiful mountains, lakes and rivers, but gave no inkling that the
wildflowers would be so wonderful, or that semi-natural woodland was such
a key feature. In a landscape like this, it is very easy to put together a
list of the characteristic plant communities that grow in its different
habitats. While much of the British landscape is a blank canvas by
comparison, it is possible to see remnants of the characteristic plant and
tree guilds that let you imagine what our landscapes could be if nature
had its way.

It has been a good year for wildflower
watching. Either I am getting better at catching the peaks of flowering,
or there just are more wildflowers around this year. Exploring new
locations has added to this feeling of abundance, but it has also
confirmed to me that variety in habitat is the key to floral diversity. We
miss so much from having farmland as the dominant habitat of our
landscape. We would gain so much from allowing a proportion of our
farmland to revert to different habitats. Contrary to the usual
propaganda, we would gain more than we would lose. I use the example of
the orchid family to illustrate this.

Government hopes to re-engage its citizens
with local democracy. The use of postal voting in the North was meant to
help that, but more than ever people are finding it difficult to believe
in a system based on party politics dominated by the national scene, and
which covers such large areas. Parish councils cover much smaller
electorates and mostly dispense with party politics. The modern parish
council has everything to offer those who want to live in a place, and
with the people, they can have a commitment to.

I walked the West Highland Way between
Drymen and Fort William early in April. The weather could have been much
kinder and I would have enjoyed the walk more. Some stretches were
wondrous, but others so bleak that it reminded me that I had read a short
article a few months before that had called the Highlands the saddest
place on earth. There is a reason for this that is only too clear if you
go back into the history of the landscape of the Highlands.

Will Hutton is a great observer of the state of British Society. His
observation of the 30-30-40 society in the mid-nineties led me to believe
that our society could have been ripe for schism into new communities. It
didn't happen. Hutton still impresses with his take on contemporary
society. His recent plea for progress on the back of science, supported
within a strong public realm, got me to thinking about new communities
again, but planned and agreed, and recognised in the public realm as
probably necessary for our progress.

We persecute wild animals if they are any
threat to us. I think it is our attitude that is to blame. In the same way
that we persecute people by "de-humanising" them, we have done the same to
wild animals by taking away their dignity - we treat them only as vermin
to be controlled and managed. This attitude is ingrained, but we can
reverse it if we give wild animals their own domain so that they can
exhibit their natural behaviour, safe in their natural habitat.

Nature thrills me with its scented blossoms in the depths of winter. I
have waited nearly 10 years for a wintersweet to flower well. How much
time do I have left to do something with my life if the good things need
such a patient timeline? At 50 years old, what should be my priority?

Government provides policy guidance on a
range of planning areas such as housing, green belt and nature
conservation. The policy guidance process is being revamped and new policy
statements (instead of guidance) are being drafted and released for
consultation. This is a response to the consultation on the rural planning
policy statement (PPS 7). The statement appears to be more favourable to
rural business diversification, but in the long term rural planning policy
must accommodate both the establishment of significant areas of wild,
self-willed land and of land with more human-scale use through low impact
development.

A radio
interview about a new national park in Scotland got me thinking about why
land protection in America is so different to that in the UK. And so I
researched the detail of how wilderness has so much more support in
America, when it seems we are still stuck in denial about how we manage
and view our land. I compare UK legislation for land protection and make a case for rewilding.
And I offer some
guidelines based on the American experience.

If
someone tells you that England is overcrowded, then don't believe anything
they say. Discussion of land use and land ownership is dogged by that
falsehood, and we ought to get it out in the open to see just how land-deprived
the ordinary person is. Could Permaculture allow better use of the land?

Walking through Seattle Centre, I saw an extract from a Shakespeare play outside
a design centre, which seemed to indicate that he had an understanding of
the design process. Would he be Permaculturist if alive today? There is
someone else who I think would would have sympathy with Permaculture if he
were around now, and that is the wilderness writer Aldo Leopold. I give
some extracts from his writings and I believe Permaculture principles fit
well with his land ethic.

Wilderness is a difficult concept for those who only know landscapes
shaped by people. I spent ten weeks walking around the wild landscapes of
North America and here I give a description of just two weeks of that
journey. The variety of the wildflower walks in Colorado stand as strong
example of the many ways that land is gifted back to nature in America.

Following
a passion or an interest is much like growing a tree from seed.
Perseverance against what might seem to be adverse odds, sometimes comes
to fruition (or in the case of the tree, begins to flower)
and it feels like a significant event has occurred.

The proposals contained in the Mid-term Review (MTR) of the Common
Agricultural Policy (CAP) could have some profound long-term consequences
for land use in Britain. MTR breaks the link between production and
subsidy, but it also creates the situation whereby farmers will be paid
for doing nothing. Is this what we want?

The Government's
Strategy on Sustainable Farming and Food was a
disappointment as it failed in its most simplest test - of supplying a
whole farm vision for the future of farming. It also adopted the Curry
Report approach of separating out organic farming and treating it
differently. I am not the only one to disagree with that, and organic
farming is not the only game in town.

Agriculture has changed the face of our planet, mostly in ways that have
smoothed out and obscured the characteristic habitats that we should have
inherited today. Resistance to accept this, and to accept change, is
endemic in rural communities who can only accommodate small
steps rather than radical prescriptions. I set the problem up here and
offer some moderate solutions.

Controlling pests is something that happens
naturally. To take advantage of it, we have to recreate the plant
communities that exist in nature. From simple companion planting with its
origins in cottage gardens, to the complex guilds of Permaculture, all
seek to attract in wild nature so that a natural balance exists between
pests and their predators.

Imitation
is not flattering when it doesn't give due credit.
Permaculture is a minority interest at present, but it is beginning to make
its mark. People who should know better are appropriating its ideas in a
process of revisionism that is unconvincing.

This was my response to the Government's consultation -
Sustainable Food and Farming: Working Together - on the
issues raised in the report from the Policy Commission on the Future of
Food and Farming (the Curry Report). It was provided on the basis of
research on rural aspirations that I did for a Metropolitan authority in a
semi-upland area of Northern England. The first section is an overview of
the findings from that districts rural community. The second section
contains responses to the specific questions raised in the consultation.

I teach a course on building natural
gardens. Its the sort of gardening I love and I get inspiration from
seeing nature's gardens, the communities of wildflowers exhibited in
characteristic habitats. Leaping the fence is an imprecation to students
to share my enthusiasm for wild nature and to use this
inspiration in their garden design.

No area
of food and farming is free from dogma. The contemporary mantra of local
food and local marketing has quickly reached the level of dogma,
forestalling any rational critique - as all dogmas are wont to do. But
does it have any merit?

The outbreak of FMD in 2001
gave rise to a lot of fevered discussion on the future of food and
farming. Few took the opportunity to stand back, clear their minds, and
think past the received wisdom of the moment. There were, however, two
interesting exceptions.

There is a lot of style over substance about organic
farming. Many of it's claims are untested rhetoric, but more
seriously its approach to long-term farming just doesn't add up.
Eventually, organic farming will deplete soil minerals and this needs to
be acknowledged.

National
charities rarely come in for public criticism. Partly this is because they
avoid detailed scrutiny, but it also because people who know better don't
want to rock the boat when it may harm the cause that they espouse. That
is the case with the organic movement in Britain - the behaviour of one
charity, the Soil Association, leaves a lot to be desired. But there is a
conspiracy of silence, even though there is a loathing and contempt felt
for it in many other organisations. I feel no inhibition to set the record
straight. You may also like to read about the anti-science nature of the
Soil Association in
Legends and Myths
in Science.

Greg
Williams launched a scathing attack on Permaculture while reviewing a book
for Whole Earth Review. Permaculture is an easy target for criticism
because it is prone to misunderstanding, and early practitioners wove
embellishments of its potential but without providing practical
demonstration. Yield is often the criteria, but Permacultural systems take
their yields in many different ways and thus are not easily comparable. I
take criticism of Permaculture as a spur to thinking about its longterm
future.

Problem
solving is key to the design for life. Solutions demand good
information on which to work, and thought processes that are given free
rein. Permaculture provides good approaches to problem solving, but there
is a fictional precursor in nexialism, the
fundaments of which are so sound that they have real, modern day
adherents.

I wrote this response, on
behalf of the Permaculture Association, to the consultation from the
Policy Commission on the Future of Food and Farming (Curry Commission).
It identified a number of current Government themes in rural
development in which Permaculture is complimentary and which could
benefit from its involvement. It also identifies the support that
Permaculture Design can provide to rural land users seeking change and who
may do this through existing strategies and programmes.

I spent many years supporting local food
initiatives and making the links into nutrition and health. Sometimes,
though, it all becomes a tedious procession of the next food initiative/fad/fiasco
and so I thought an empirical view on nutrition, looking back at what our ancestors ate, would clear the fog.

This is a briefing paper on the Permaculture
approach to farming. It explains this approach through showing how it is
complimentary to a number of current Government themes in rural
development. It was written during the time that the FMD
outbreak spawned a frenzy of reflection on the future of farming, raising
an expectation that new and different approaches would at last come in for
serious consideration.

Farmers loathe scrub, but love subsidy. In
effect, subsidising sheep farmers through the CAP is just paying for
landscapes to be mown, preventing scrub from taking hold and thus
preventing a return to woodland. Instead of paying farmers to overproduce
sheep and degrade landscapes, why don't we use the subsidy to buy farmland
and let it return to woodland that we can all enjoy?

The moor behind my home is my place of
exercise and contemplation. It was closed during the FMD outbreak,
eventually re-opening after the sheep had been culled as a dangerous
contact. Sad though that be, the moor had many users other than the sheep
and its closure because of them caused much disruption. Here I write about
the historical uses of the moor and wonder why everything is subservient
to the sheep.

Ploughing is
recognised to have contributed significantly to climate change over the
last century, releasing carbon dioxide as soil organic matter is oxidised
through exposure. This is yet another critical impact of broadscale
agriculture. Should we look to food production that is less dependent on
machinery and more in humanscale? Should the hoe replace the plough? Can
organic farming be considered in any way natural when it has a heavy
reliance on ploughing?

Historical rural depopulation, the disconnection and
de-skilling, and the long-term changes wrought by agriculture, means that
most people are divorced from the land and are unaware of current land
dynamics. Land use and ownership must come up for discussion.

It is a pity that most people have a poor
understanding of the science of the natural world. Learning about the
tricks that nature gets up to may not get people to accept
biotechnology, but at least it would allow them to understand the
rationale behind it.

The new
battleground in farming today is science. In a world that is increasingly
being battered over the head by subjectivity, science holds on to the
need for value free discovery that has a high level of confidence. Except
that scientists are blamed for BSE and for biotechnology by the very same
people who aren't able to substantiate their own claims. How can the
public decide?

I learnt
not to judge a magazine by its cover when an American backwoods magazine
turned out to offer more than just advice on low impact building, solar
energy, composting toilets, and a food dehydrator.

Future studies
are an emerging tool for exploring public policy. The Government's
Foresight Program has recently looked at the food chain and come up with
some important observations. The four future scenarios spun for the
consultation challenge us to look past our blind spots. In my case, it
confirmed an intention to break with the subjectivity and prejudices of
the organic world.

Do you know how much of our land is given over to
agriculture - and how much of that is just to support livestock? Very few
people do in spite of the fact that agriculture dominates most of our
landscape. It wasn't always so. Historically we had far more woodland and
I suppose the urge to live in the woods, like Robin Hood, makes me want to
see that woodland come back.

The
urban community food growing movement blossomed from the mid 1990s
onwards, supported by the Growing Food in Cities report, and the
conference of the same name held in Bradford in 1996. Farming communities
around large urban areas were proving unresponsive to the needs of urban
communities, and access to rural land for new entrants to food production
was difficult. It is not surprising therefore that urban communities took
responsibility and developed food growing projects on the only land they
had access to.

The concerted
approach of environment groups in destroying the image of biotechnology in
the public's mind means that simple discussion on the issues is long past. People
now only expect scare stories. Here is some dramatic fiction that
really should make people scared.

People don't
drop dead from eating conventionally produced food. As food and nutrition
gains further ground as an issue in health action, so do the calls for it
to be sourced from natural production. Fine in principle, but natural food
carries a price burden. The disadvantaged already have to make difficult
food choices. We shouldn't burden them with a choice that only the
affluent can afford to make.

Shrubby plantings besides roadways and on central reservations represent
the new urban hedgerows, offering refuge to wildlife as well as colour
through flowers, leaves and berries. The shrubs are chosen for their
survival value in urban situations, as well as how they look. One reason
for this survival is that the shrubs may be nitrogen fixers, but they are
not members of the pea family having instead Frankia as the bacteria
symbiont . Other plant families have this symbiont, and can be found in a
range of habitats.

Hypocrisy
bedevils the organic movement - not in the small, pioneering producers,
but in the venality of the bigger producers and in the certification
organisation that does so much to support a commercial imperative.
Certification is supposedly an assurance to the purchaser and consumer -
the gold standard as it has been dubbed by the leading certifier.
There is increasing evidence that this gold standard is being bought off.